During Delta Air Lines’ second quarter 2022 earnings call, CEO Ed Bastian turned some heads with a comment he made about a charter flight from London to Detroit that carried just bags. However, this might not have been quite as charitable as it first sounded.
Continue reading: Delta’s Transatlantic Bag Flight: Not (Quite) What It Seems
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
In before Tim Dunn let’s us know that everything Delta did here was genius of the highest order!
Unrelated but the miles flown, words written, and posts published counts have remained the same ever since you redesigned the site. Why have these not been updated and what is the point of having them if they will stay unchanged? Genuinely curious
Seems like the real story is all the pax who were suddenly stranded in London or faced with the reality that their vacations/reunions with familiar and friends were now ruined.
Regardless of how Ed spins-it, it was good for customers and made good business sense. Delta's working really hard to bring-back their operational integrity which is especially hard in Europe where some of their partner hubs are woefully understaffed and dealing with labor issues. I flew R/T ATL:AMS in the last 10 days and was on-time and had my checked bags at both ends.
I don't understand how, if Heathrow is forcing airlines to cancel flights to limit passenger numbers, Delta was then able to reaccommodate all those passengers on other flights? Doesn't that mean Delta moved the same number of passengers?
I knew there was simply no way that Heathrow was going to sit back and watch Schiphol have all the glory for being aviation's biggest cluster.
Still missing one of my bags from three weeks ago from Firenze. Not sure why there is no way to check where my bag even is in todays age lol. Had to search through 2000 bags to find my bags a few weeks ago. Train is the way to go! And apple tag 🙂
I agree, in the most siloed organizations, the plane would have just flown back empty for repositioning, but there was some creativity here with one person saying hey, we have 1,000s of bags that need to go to the US; we should put it on this repositioning flight. Hopefully, that individual got a spot bonus!
He will be by soon to tell us Delta slipped a small gold nugget into every bag just to be nice
The real question is not how Delta managed to get 1000 bags out of LHR but that there are that many bags that were clearly separated from their owners.
1000 bags is anywhere from 2-4 entire planeloads worth of bags if every seat was sold depending on the number of bags per passenger.
Since the widely circulated picture with the mountain of bags was purportedly in the BA terminal at LHR, how many bags were sitting around LHR and in what terminals given that DL doesn't operate in the BA terminal?
You genuinely have to ask when the wheels began to fall off the wagon and why it took so long to realize things needed to be fixed.
You also have to wonder how many airlines asked to be able to send their own employees to LHR to fix the problem.
and, of course, how large the problem is in other airports as well.
It’s bad at CDG as well, if two weeks ago was any indication of how things are currently going.
May have rebooked them on another airline which has capacity elsewhere e.g. transfer them on a flight to Frankfurt or Dublin then on an onward connection out of there. So may not be carried by Delta.
As for luggage, passengers may have had 1hr+ connection so just made the transfer at London, but their luggage didn't.
they could easily take legal actions against LHR like what EK are doing, DL might be commendable for this instead of making matters worse
Business and marketing. You could argue that that this was a chartered flight because it is for a special purpose and was not originally planned.
Delta used a spare plane they had in London to fly an off-schedule (charter) flight carrying only luggage, for which they were not compensated by anyone (on their own dime). Careful with the hair splitting, you might end up bald.