There's a good claim that he should not be taking seats up when countless customers are still being booked out days in advance on multi-leg itineraries. If there was magically an open seat, and no one needed rebooking, sure, his trip to Paris is totally fine and he can manage from there.

Optics is awful and tone deaf, it’s a big middle finger to the front line staff dealing with thousands of upset and angry customers. Who would want to work for a company like this when the captain abandons the sinking ship to drink champagne and dine on caviar in Paris?

Did he fly coach?

Highly doubt it since his girlfriend/fiancé tagged along. Wouldn’t be a Premium Experience, on a Premium Airline. Nothing has been posted to his Instagram account yet.

LOL. No, but if it's at a location where the cars have been pre-selected for me and two different space numbers are given, I will go check to see which vehicle I like better!

Excellent point. There was an interesting post on JonNYC's X.com feed over the weekend that pointed to legacy systems with team members who knew how to use them as a key reason that AA and UA were able to respond far more effectively for passenger rebooking:


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GTCRT0WW...g&name=900x900

Nonsense. This is bad optics to everyone: employees, who have busted their ... for five days and will have to continue to for this to be fully resolved. Customers, many of whom are still days away from getting home and/or are already out hundreds to thousands of dollars. Government officials, who were already breathing down Delta's neck over this.

Honestly, I cannot see him doing something this tone-deaf unless the writing is already on the wall and he's on his way out. Even if there's nothing you can't do from Paris that you can do from anywhere else, you don't abandon your employees in the middle of a crisis.

The "dude" did not handle the situation at all.

The only way that I see EB getting fired is if employee morale takes such a big hit that it would not recover without a change in leadership. I think this is the hit to employee morale that is needed to get him fired...what a slap in the face to employees that have worked their tails off.

Very interesting take on UA and SHARES, but there's some more history there. When UA cutover to the single passenger service system (SHARES, inherited from CO) in March 2012, there were significant operational challenges because while PMCO agents knew how to use it, PMUA agents had no historical experience with it and the training they were provided was superficial. During the immediate cutover and for some time afterwards, UA struggled immensely with routine tasks for passengers (checking in, changing flights, IROP handling, etc.). Eventually things did smooth out, but I became concerned years later when I saw that DL was restricting access to DLTerm in favor of SNAPP because I knew that it was only a matter of time before that institutional knowledge was lost. And I've experienced that personally over the past few years with the junior agents and the "I only know what the computer tells me to do" mentality that is so frustrating. I did have an experience recently where an agent helping me did a "Screw it, we'll do it LIVE!" and went into DLTerm, and a few newer agents lurking nearby came over with a legitimate interest in learning the commands and process. I found that refreshing.

It is interesting to see that UA recognized they had a risk there (well, likely learning from prior mistakes) and took steps to address it to minimize the risk their operation going forward.

In the post you quoted, all I'm reading is like someone on here who has talked to a hand full of agents at the airlines and read a few PRs/websites of the reservation system companies.

I know SNAPP is the devil here, but pretty much nothing in that quote has much to do with what happened with Delta. It also has nothing to do with crew scheduling and such.........
Can you tell us what systems at Delta went down? When they went down? How many servers Delta had impacted? What kind of end point outage Delta had? How interwoven Crowdstrike is in those systems/servers/end points? Then do the same for other airlines? It will make the comparison easier for those of us, unlike yourself, that knows exactly who is using what, what went down for who, etc. etc. Thanks!

Delta's reaction has been terrible. Delta should be paying its passengers out the nose for to gain goodwill alone. I won't even comment on Ed bouncing for Paris.

but I have a feeling the vast majority of the people in this thread don't have the smallest idea what they are talking about. I'm also willing to bet that Crowdstrike probably ends up sending a check to Delta, among others, over this issue.
That is hilarious.

Apparently, the price of a catastrophic systemwide computer failure is 12,500 SkyMiles per person affected.

For the record, DL 84 yesterday departed ATL F8 two hours and eleven minutes late, at 12:06 am (actually July 24th) and arrived at CDG at 2:07 pm, one hour and thirty-seven minutes late. It was an A330-300.

Rumor has it that Ed held up the flight for some last minute meetings, thus why he was on the last DL flight out of Atlanta last night and a D1 seat to sleep.

to unionize the Delta FA’s, as this might be the final push to the finish line. If so, would be a HBR case review for the ages.

I have had to cancel business trips, move vacation days, and work on days off for far more mundane fire drills than what DL has experienced.

bad optics, dude.

Let's not be too hard on Ed, now that United and Delta are really starting to compete with each other, Ed had also compete with United's meltdown a year ago not only with cancellation numbers but also by taking unnecessary trips in the middle of it! He was inspired by Scott Kirby's private jet flight to his Colorado vacation home last year. Nothing to see here!