NEW YORK (AP) – We don’t cancel flights.
That’s been the message for the past two years from Delta Air Lines. Double decker buses roamed the streets of New York, wrapped in ads proclaiming “canceling cancellations.” Delta executives boasted about the number of days without a single flight scrapped.
That all literally ground to a halt Monday when a system-wide computer outage led to the cancellation of more than 1,500 flights. Passengers were stranded around the globe with many spending the night in the airport.
Until this outage, Delta had an impressive record, envied by other airlines. By June 9 of this year, Delta had already notched up 100 days where none of its own jets canceled flights – more than all of its major competitors’ no-cancel days combined. And the cancellations during the other 61 days were mostly related to weather, not maintenance issues.
“Our people are hitting it out of the park, delivering on our promise to be a safe and reliable airline and making canceling cancellations a reality,” Gil West, Delta’s chief operating officer, said in a news release at the time trumpeting its record.