Delta outage will require a lot of ‘rejiggering’ to fix

It’s going to take more than just a few hours for Delta Air Lines to rebound from a worldwide computer system outage, KIRO Radio travel expert Steve Danishek says.

More than twelve hours after Delta was grounded by the outage, it was still struggling to resume normal operations. That’s not surprising when you hear what Danishek has to say.

“They have to get the aircraft where they’re supposed to be and the crews properly rested and where they’re supposed to be,” he explained. “So there’s a lot of rejiggering that’s going to occur to get everything back in order.”

By mid-day, Delta said it had canceled 451 flights. Tracking service FlightStats Inc. counted 2,000 delayed flights — about one-third of the airline’s entire schedule. Delta representatives said the airline was investigating the cause of the meltdown. They declined to describe whether the airline’s system had enough built-in redundancies to recover quickly from a hiccup.

But it isn’t just the technology that will slow things down, according to Danishek.

“The compounding problem, at this time of year, is there’s very few empty seats,” Danishek said. “When they start getting things moved around and back up and operating, there’s going to be insufficient seats to move some of the folks whose flights were actually cancelled.

The Associated Press reports passengers were venting their frustration that they received no notice of a global disruption. They discovered they would not be making their flights after going through security.

“The problem is Delta is a huge carrier — one of the largest in the world — to cripple the central part of the system simply causes problems worldwide.”

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