Delta Air Lines Targets Normal Operations for Midday
August 10 2016 - 04:20AM
Dow Jones News
LONDON—Delta Air Lines Inc. said about 90 flights would be
canceled Wednesday in a continued spillover from a computer system
failure that caused travel havoc Monday.
The flight cancellations would occur early, with normal
operations projected for later in the day, said the No. 2 U.S.
carrier by traffic.
The airline canceled 775 flights Tuesday after about 1,000 were
annulled the day before when a systems failure occurred in the
early hours of Monday. Delta Chief Operating Officer Gil West said
on Tuesday that a "power control module" at the airline's
technology center malfunctioned "causing a surge to the transformer
and a loss of power." Backup systems didn't kick in as
expected.
"We continued today to steadily recover from the events of
earlier this week that grounded our system, and are working hard to
achieve a normal operation by midday tomorrow," said the airline's
senior vice president for operations, Dave Holtz.
The disruption has angered passengers. Delta said it would
continue its policy of allowing some passengers to rebook without a
fee for another day, and said unaccompanied minors wouldn't be
permitted to begin traveling on Wednesday.
The airline said it had dispatched reservation agents to its
busy Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport hub, the
world's busiest, to bolster the staff available to assist
passengers.
Delta is the latest U.S. carrier to be hit by major disruptions
from technical problems. That has raised questions about whether a
recent wave of four U.S. airline mergers, which created four large
carriers controlling 85% of domestic capacity, has built companies
too large and too reliant on IT systems that date from the 1990s.
Delta merged with Northwest Airlines eight years ago.
Joe Leader, chief executive of the Atlanta-based Airline
Passenger Experience Association, said the high degree of
automation in airline systems and the push by airlines to get
passengers to embrace online check-in or smartphone applications
has made it more difficult to recover from system outages when they
occur. "We have become so reliant on the technology that people
have genuinely forgotten how to go to manual mode."
Write to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 10, 2016 04:05 ET (08:05 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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