Reconfiguring the hub arrangement is terribly complicated. There will be weather meltdowns from time to time at any hub. You really can't weather-proof the hub arrangement. MEM is not the answer.

But what Delta has got to do better is recover more quickly from the meltdowns. And a large part of that is mobilizing every Delta phone agent so that you can answer the phone when the meltdown occurs OR truly making the website and app work better for IROPS. There needs to an "engage meltdown mode" where all rules are suspended and if a customer needs to route via Seattle to get from one east coast city to another, they can do it.

Part of that is giving up on this premise that "it's weather-related so we aren't responsible." No, you can't control the weather, but you have got to get your entire organization whipped into shape to deal in an understanding and accommodating fashion with thousands of horribly inconvenienced passengers.

yeah I mean since CVG and MEM have perfect weather.......

This one is easy... ATL can't flood. It sits at 1,000 feet ASL and the airport itself sits on a plateau. Atlanta also doesn't have significant earthquakes. The nearest faults are up in northern Tennessee. A tornado wouldn't take years to recover from; a tornado hits the field probably once every couple of years and the buildings are built to withstand the standard damae. We don't get F4/F5s in Atlanta. Per the National Weather Service, there have been only 9 F4 tornados in Georgia since 1950. The last one near Atlanta happened in 1992.

Re underutilizaiton of other hubs. There is a lot other hubs just can't efficiently cover. DL has a lock on a lot of the Southeast flying. Where's that go? Also, Northeast to the South... LGA can handle so much and you're not going to fly west to DTW from ALB to get to MIA. It's an "accident" that AA has hubs in CLT, PHL, and DCA... those weren't ever part of Bob Crandall's plans. UA was in trouble in the east... IAD isn't a particularly good hub and they needed EWR and IAH to stay competitive. I'm not sure we're in the same competitive landscape as the early 2000s. For 362 days of the year, Delta's model is great for them. Look back just a year ago to Crowdstrike... that recovery demonstrated DL's real issues which involve underinvestment in IT.

I'm not sure that's the answer, the rules are already "susupended" any time you have interrupted travel, in this case it seems like the BIGGEST issue is (once again) crew being out of position, and the app having more buttons isn't going to magically make that go away.

ATL is farther west than DTW, you just do it all at once to DTW. Your point isn't missed, but that is hardly an egregious out-of-the-way hub example. I am sure many people have done it.

Back to the point at hand. There is nothing you can do. When Delta had east hubs in DTW, CVG, MEM, and ATL, they are practically on top of each other from an airline perspective. Two of them were going to go. Any suggestion that they come back is completely out of touch with the business operations of a major airline. Austin might gradually build up but that doesn't change the picture of this situation in the least.

I agree in pushing Austin, along with the Focus Cities. They are kind of doing it with RDU and BNA and could have backup plans in place to divert more flights/ push fligths there along with CVG. They have the capacity but not the staff.

At his Point BNA has double or triple the flighs of MEM. If they are going to make a mini hub BNA is the better choice, since they have direct flights to non hubs also

Unexpected and never seen before things can happen at any time. The fact that DL pushes so many butts through ATL simply exposes them to bigger problems when things go sideways there. It's a consequence of how they have chosen to structure their network. It's a choice they have made and they have to live with it when the s**t hits the fan in ATL.

No-one is saying other hubs should take over Southeast flying. Not sure where you got that idea. However, there are plenty of non-sensical/illogical connections that are pushed through ATL all the time in order to put butts in seats in/out of ATL. Plenty of East-West and Midwest-West itineraries are fashioned through ATL when they could be handled more logically via other interior hubs. Delta can force connections via ATL by limiting the number of flights into/out of the other hubs and they do just that. It's a conscious decision. BTW, ALB-DTW-MIA is not at all a crazy connection. There are much more nonsensical routings that are pushed via ATL. I just did a search for an imaginary trip from CLE to PDX in July. Looking only at one-stop options, the app comes up with 8 routings via ATL, 4 via MSP, 2 via DTW, 1 via SLC, and 1 via JFK. Using your own words...you're not going to fly South to ATL from CLE to get to PDX. It makes no sense right? Yet DL wants people in Cleveland to do just that. Similar routings will be seen if you start from EWR/PIT/BUF/PHL/BWI/PVD/CMH/CVG/IND (and others) and want to go anywhere out West.

I personally feel it's a mistake for DL to rely so heavily on ATL and that a more well-balanced network would serve them better longer term. Another person would argue that DL is successful in no small way due to the strength of the ATL hub and that ATL should be protected at all cost. In the end, they are just opinions.

"Regular" IRROPS are better at Atlanta than any other airport in the United States because of the frequency of flights. Anyone that O&Ds primarily in Atlanta or usually transits in Atlanta doesn't know what a lot of other hubs are like. Many hubs only offer 1-2X frequencies on minor routes where Delta has 3X dailies to 95%+ of Atlanta's domestic destinations (number is made up, but probably pretty accurate). Missing a flight at another hub may mean waiting 7 hours or an overnight stay or a double connect to get there. In Atlanta, it usually means waiting a couple of hours before going on the next one. Plus, the sheer scale of Atlanta makes spare management and ATC/jetstream-related swapping of equipment much easier which results in more cost efficient operations and lower "regular" IRROPS.

Do Atlanta meltdowns suck? Yeah, they do, just because of their volume and scale. But Atlanta is also a resilient hub because so much of their pilots and metal are all based at the hub. The vast, vast majority of flights out of Atlanta are out and backs with very few ATL-XXX-Other Hub flights compared to other hubs. The out and back approach isolates the network from damage and also allows faster recovery (fewer out of place crews).

And let's also just be real. Atlanta is, without a doubt, the most profitable airline hub in the country. Other airlines are trying to make there hubs more like Atlanta. For example, American Airlines has spent billions trying to turn DFW into their Atlanta. Why would Delta sacrifice that profit for IRROPS/"meltdowns" that occur roughly once every 9-18 months? There's zero chance of that.

So, I think DL could do with one or two more hubs. They've already improved on this a bit with growth at SEA, and they're pretty decent in the northeastern US (DTW, NYC, BOS), but I think one more in the Southeast wouldn't hurt (MCO would probably be my vote given both the raw amount of endpoint traffic there and the theoretical ability to use Brightline to shift some traffic around in FL), even if it wouldn't be as big as ATL.

The other failures here are:
(1) A failure to issue a waiver on Friday, covering Saturday and Sunday. Look, the minute the hail started falling at ATL this was unrecoverable in an evening, and a lot of folks would have benefitted from being able to shift their travel by a day or two. If you've got good TI, just hunker down in downtown ATL until Sunday evening; if not, you can at least cancel.
(2) The app just dumping folks over to call in (only to be reminded about the app on calling in... >.<) is a colossal failure given how much Delta has been pushing folks to use it. I'd also point out a related failure, of not pushing folks to a working link to the IRROPS tool on the website. Something broke and it wrote policy for DL in a way that is deeply problematic.

That would be if you for some odd reason wanted to fly pre-merger NW from ALB to Florida. The old, nasty DTW airport would be your connection point.

But, back to the original thread - I don't know what happened in ATL, but if this happened all the time, it would be a horror story, but it doesn't. ATL is very reliable despite its massive size. Compare that to any of the NYC airport and I'd always book a connection via ATL over NYC in any season.

I agree with the rest of your post, but how would MCO be a viable connecting hub? Outside of South Florida and parts of the Caribbean, any passenger connecting there would have to backtrack. There is a ton of O&D demand, but it's primarily lower yield leisure travel. You can't make hub economics work with both low yield O&D traffic AND high cost to serve, low-yield connecting traffic with backtracking.

I know South Florida has a big population, but there's a reason no one has a connecting hub (outside of Miami, which is geared to international connections) in Florida. It's because it's literally the worst possible connecting point in the United States (yes, even worse than BOS/SEA).

Getting crews and equipment back into position is a BIG issue, for sure, but if you get the crews and equipment back in position but folks can't rebook on those resurrected flights without enduring a 5 hour phone wait, not sure what you have accomplished. And when rules are "suspended" in the event of unexpected events, it seems like it is never proactive enough and that it takes several hours or even a day for news of said suspension to filter all the way through the system.

I also wonder, since one of the problems is crews timing out, if in special situations the feds couldn't relax the limits a wee bit. I don't think there is a material safety difference if a crew goes 30 minutes over a limit in an exceptional circumstance.

This gets into the murkiness of changing both federal law as well as amending the pilot contract. From the DL pilots I know, there would be little to no appetite to adjust this. Not the least of which is because there were, according to them, provisions entered into in the last contract to improve staffing reliability levels (in particular something called "Voluntary Airport Standby" or VAS -- basically crews sitting in Ops at the airport waiting for a trip in IRROPS) that have apparently not been rolled out to the extent envisioned/desired.

I've also heard of some horror stories of e.g. FAs being pressured to waive hours of service after exceedingly exhausting days under normal conditions.

What does this mean? FAs can't unilaterally "waive" federal regulations.