Delta had an extremely rough Thanksgiving. While the airline is typically known for its operational reliability, it canceled over 600 flights over a four day period, including over 270 cancelations on Thanksgiving day alone. As a point of comparison, both American and United ran nearly flawless operations over the same period.
Continue reading: Delta Blames Thanksgiving Cancelations On Coronavirus
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At the moment frontline staff can’t take the risk , even if it’s just a regular cold. Flights with light loads , assuming the cargo is also light , may be consolidated.
Whatever Delta did/does was/is the right thing.
Everyone here knows they’re the best.
Now the typical OMAAT comment sycophants can take the day off.
I don't think Delta can really be faulted here. People who did not need to travel should have just stayed home. There was no need to run around this year, given the pandemic. Except for those who had to travel for work, had family emergencies, and the like, those that just got on a plane because they craved normality are simply selfish and inconsiderate and have put countless lives at risk, including Delta employees.
@ shoeguy -- Sorry, you don't blame Delta for adding capacity it wasn't capable of offering? You realize the airline wasn't forced to add all of this capacity, right? Keep in mind that airlines choosing to add capacity contributed to the number of people traveling.
Delta can absolutely be faulted for failing to supply a service if they knew they were running close to their capacity. We’re a little late in the pandemic to be sloppy with operations and planning.
Maybe if Delta wasn’t stupidly blocking out middle seats it wouldn’t have had a capacity issue.
And don’t me started on how Delta wants to make us all alcohols by serving as much beer and gas station wine as we can drink at 7 am but won’t serve coffee or Diet Coke, even in first-class or Delta One between LAX and JFK.
Sounds like Delta scheduled to many flights for the resources at hand - including a margin for the unexpected. Not typical for them for sure. The degree of the miss is surprising.
@FNT Delta Diamond
Southwest, Alaska, and JetBlue were also blocking middle seats during the Thanksgiving holiday, yet they didn't have cancelation issues, so I doubt that was the main cause. Just bad planning on Delta's end.
The statement from John Laughter refers to quarantine requirements. I really wonder what those requirements are for Delta, and how they compare to the other airlines, and other companies in general.
I work in the healthcare field, and at the beginning of the pandemic we were quarantining a lot of employees for Covid exposure. This just could not last very long--we do not have enough people to allow that. Now it is more focused on those who are symptomatic. But if Delta is still benching everyone in the flight training center for 2 weeks because they came in contact with one positive case, that could really affect operations.
Balancing crew schedules with the possibility of positive tests (and consequent contact tracing procedures) is a nightmare right now, especially if you want to do it right. My own airline's operation was hit with a spate of positive tests in September where suddenly our crew positives spiked by nearly 300% - and due to the testing/results schedule resulted in an average of 3.5 people per positive test having to be placed in quarantine (we maintained block pairings on a weekly basis to mitigate against positive tests, but the tests and results were conducted over the schedule switchover period when pairings changed thus creating additional exposures). We managed to make it through the critical period thanks to a very solid scheduling team and very cooperative crews willing to fly absolute max legal hours, but it was touch and go for a few days - just one more positive test and we would have had to start cancelling flights.
So yeah, much smaller scale, but I can easily see how it could quickly spiral out of control at Delta or anywhere else. It's just that the excrement hit the fan over Thanksgiving, which magnified it.
This is because DL blocks middle seats. COVID 19 is just an easy excuse. Also if we as a society start forcing anyone that could have been exposed to someone with COVID to lockdown good luck getting the basics like food. Hysteria at it's best and only going to get better.
Delta’s a mess! They overplayed their hand and tried to blame it all on the virus instead of poor planning. I believe the pilots on this one. Seems anything that goes wrong now, in any business, is blamed on COVID.
What this goes to show you is that some of these airline mergers should not have been approved by the federal government. We desperately need an additional full-service, national airline with international partners, not a regional or mostly regional carrier. American, United, and Delta need real competition. Southwest, JetBlue, and Alaska just can’t do it. Imagine if the USMCA replacement for NAFTA had lifted cabotage and Air Canada or Aeromexico could compete within the United States.
Haven't look at their current schedule, but couldn't they operate more wide body between hubs and transcon (reduce frequency but free up some narrow bodies). Would have liked learning about that. Maybe they already did that to some extent.
There was (as usual) a large disconnect amongst us-ians with corona virus "news" hype versus reality.