CalVol

Might I add that, according to Mrs CalVol, if this fiasco screws with our travel plans later this week.... :0

Flaflyer

Gee whiz numbers. Most of their flights go through ATL daily. With annual revenue of $39.6 billion, DL has a revenue of $108 million per day. Half of that is $54 million. Less the mega fuel savings for Flights Not Flown.

Orange County Commuter

Just a note.
Those of you
calling for the National Guard do realize that it's citizen soldiers right? They were not sitting at a central area waiting to be deployed?

Flaflyer

Serious question. What are you doing on a blog for commercial airline passengers? You obviously must be "in the know" and control of your destiny by piloting your own private jet. I am so sure you would never want to be in a passenger jet, a dark crowded space with many other people around where your destiny is controlled by a stranger up front who you never even met.

GSP flyer

While Atlanta is super profitable for Delta because of it's size and scope, it still enjoys that size and scope even if it was to be shrunk a bit. Delta now runs about 1030 daily flights through ATL. What I'll propose is an Atlanta operation that's 800 to 900 departures daily; add another big bank at DTW and reconnect many of the markets that lost DTW service after the merger (ex: SJC, CAE, CRW), add service from MSP and SLC to more second tier markets (ex: PIT/CLE-SLC, PVD/ORF-MSP). While CVG is never going to be a booming Delta hub, I could see them bringing back some limited destinations like Seattle, Phoenix, Austin, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh. That'd be a more redundant operation for Delta, and would make Hartsfield a more pleasant place. The core of the ATL terminal facilities, built in 1980, is not built to handle the passenger volumes Delta is shoving through it these days.

Flaflyer

You still have a single switch. In ATL the room containing the switch was on fire. Melted transfer switches do not operate, and wires with melted insulation also do not work very well. Even in the non union South, I am sure there are safety regulation prohibiting electricians from entering burning rooms to flip manual switches. Please correct me if I am wrong about this.

dinanm3atl

Not at all and it only continues to get worse as the planes get more and more full. It's bad news and future isn't bright. Delta making so much money they simply don't care? Is that truly the case? With the level of problems, which seems to be 2-3 times a year now, that ATL is causing them costing 100s of millions each time why do they continue to do this?

dinanm3atl

This. I am not an electrician. I do have multiple race cars I have built and race and my job requires me to have backup equipment just in case. How a single problem could cripple the entire airport is just stupid IMO. Sure there is more to the story and more behind the scenes but it comes off as very dumb. I get a car has one battery cable. House just one input. But having something like this take the entire place down is crazy.

Maybe GA Power will adjust... and DL will continue to add more pax/planes/routes to ATL.

RealHJ

Who in their right mind would put all the switches in some remote room?? Certainly no one who knows what they are doing. That goes against all good design principles, and makes it practically pointless. Each MTS or ATS would be in front of each load. Several 100s of them. E.g. one at every gate area. Otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of A&B feeds, if there is only one (not two) power paths to the load. The diverse paths have to come in from different sides (e.g. south and north) and converge only at the load they are powering. The MTS, ATS or what not has to be very close to the load, if not right adjacent to it. In the scope of ATL that would be several 100s of such devices all over, each with two diverse power feeds coming from two different directions. Simple electric design 101.

Or again cheaper option, as another poster suggested, 1/2 of each terminal fed from a diverse power source, so if something blows up or fails upstream, only 1/2 of each terminal is down, not the whole airport. No redundancy on the loads, very cheap (negligible add'l cost vs. current single source).

RRDD

Many sophisticated electrical systems do not rely on "transfer switches". An electrical "bus" may have two, three or more supply breakers. If the system senses zero voltage on the bus, it then locks out the first breaker, and closes the second breaker. If the second breaker fails to restore power, then the system locks out the first two breakers and closes the third.

A human person may also take control of the system and manually close breakers.

RatherBeOnATrain

In case anyone is inbound to ATL: Link - AJC.com - Airport SkyTrain to rental car center currently down (2:19 p.m Monday, Dec. 18, 2017)

LegalTender

Plato90s

It's quite common for municipal power to have all the transformers/switches for an area in a single location. In 2012, there was a fire that took out the building housing high-voltage transformers for the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, which is packed full of high-end residential as well as commercial buildings. It took 2 days to start restoring power, and they trucked in HUGE replacement units and ran street-level heavy-duty cabling (conduits were about 8 inches wide) which remained in place for months.

So I'm not surprised that ATL airport was fed from a single facility.


And yes, I know that data centers can run on generator. But they charge more per-KWHr than any airport authority would consider paying.

scottpenderson

Pictures show damage to equipment that caused airport power outage | WSB-TV

HDQDD

This isn't a server room, it's the World's largest airport. It's simply not worth billions to have dual power feeds at every single endpoint (since most end devices don't support redundant power supplies anyway). There's not one airport in the World that has this. Like I said before, there has to be at least one point where the power supplies meet (even if it's at the actual end device) to determine which feed is passed on, and in this case, that switch was where the fire occurred. Once we know what caused the fire, we can argue about how it could/should have been designed differently.

I suspect ATL's electrical design is similar to almost every other major airport. Look no further than the NE power outage of 2003. If you lose power from your provider, it's simply not possible/feasible to power all airport systems on backup/emergency power.

Lights did work for some time (there are pictures in this thread that show emergency lights on) and sliding doors can be put in manual mode (or just pulled apart). The airport should have evacuated long before the emergency light batteries ran out. Perhaps they did, I don't know.

But then you'd be trolling that only half the airport worked... The fact of the matter is, it's not feasible to run a major airport operation on backup/emergency power for many hours. They should have evacuated sooner, but I don't know what kind of updates were being shared between all the parties involved. I'm sure they'll be talking about their response in the coming days/weeks.