As a result of an electrical power outage which forced the international airport which serves the greater Atlanta metropolitan area to completely shut down for approximately twelve hours on Sunday, December 17, 2017, the chief executive officer of Delta Air Lines is seeking up to $50 million in the repayment of losses.
Bastian Seeks Repayment of Up to $50 Million in Losses From Atlanta Airport Meltdown
“We will certainly be seeking the opportunity to have a conversation, and then seek reimbursement,” Edward Bastian said during a recent interview with Kelly Yamanouchi of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I don’t know whose responsibility it is between the airport and Georgia Power, but we’re going to have conversations with both of them.”
Hundreds of flights were canceled during that debacle, which caused tens of thousands of passengers to be inconvenienced for many hours either aboard airplanes or in the airport itself. Some people were without food, water and even access to toilet facilities for hours.
In addition to the cost of approximately 1,400 flights canceled flights and the issuance of travel waivers, Delta Air Lines also voluntarily reimbursed customers who booked reservations for hotel accommodations in Atlanta during that Sunday.
The official statement from Georgia Power is that the power failure involved a fire which caused extensive damage in an underground electrical facility operated by Georgia Power:
The fire was safely extinguished by fire crews before Georgia Power could enter the area to assess damage and begin repairs. The event impacted not only the underground facilities, but also substations serving the Airport and, while the cause is not yet known, Georgia Power’s system responded by isolating areas where equipment wasn’t operating correctly to ensure safety and minimize damage. No personnel or passengers were in danger at any time.
Georgia Power has many redundant systems in place to ensure reliability for the Airport and its millions of travelers — power outages affecting the Airport are very rare.
Summary
As you might have already guessed, the majority of the people who commented on the article written by Kelly Yamanouchi had little to no sympathy for Delta Air Lines: “What a greedy fool. It’s too bad passengers can’t sue Delta for lost revenue, time and expense, etc., whenever the airline is responsible for massive flight disruptions. Last spring’s computer system failure, stranding THOUSANDS for days, comes to mind. But passengers did get a sincere apology.”
Reader Rebekah Giambroni asked “Delta which passengers were lucky enough to be reimbursed for hotel stays? Certainly not my husband who got stranded in Minneapolis after his flight to Atlanta was cancelled. You told him he had to pay you to book him a room and that he would get a ‘distressed passenger’ discount. There was NO discount- it was the same price for a regular room on the hotel’s website! When he called about it, your employee said there was nothing they could do. Where is our reimbursement?”
I do not believe that Delta Air Lines is responsible for what happened; but could the situation have been handled better by the airline — especially as it operates greater than 75 percent of the flights in and out of the airport? One may argue in the affirmative, as the greatest concentration of flights operated by Delta Air Lines are in Atlanta — and when the airport fails in some manner, so almost automatically does the airline. Hopefully, revised and improved contingency plans will be designed and implemented by all of the entities responsible for what happened this past weekend.
Delta Air Lines had ended its interline agreements with many airlines — such as Emirates Airline and American Airlines — but in this situation, other airlines were not operating out of that airport either during the power outage; so interline agreements would have done little to alleviate passengers…
…which raises a more important question: is the need for a controversial second airport to serve the greater Atlanta metropolitan area even more important than ever as a result of the meltdown?
Photograph ©2016 by Brian Cohen.
