By 9 a.m. this morning Delta Air Lines had cancelled over 80 flights today, on what’s expected to be the busiest travel day since March. There are even more cancellations tomorrow. So far FlightAware appears to be tracking over 420 Delta cancellations throughout the holiday weekend.
As of this writing, according to FlightAware,
- Delta has 88 cancelled flights and experienced 177 delayed flights (this compares to 13 cancels and 51 delays at United, 13 cancels and 34 delays at Southwest, and 7 cancels and 105 delays at American)
- Delta has already cancelled 192 flights for Thursday or 13% of their schedule (this compares to 5 at United, and 1 each at American and Southwest)
Almost all of the cancellations appear to be either Boeing 737s or Airbus narrowbody flights, though of course those are the bulk of what Delta is scheduled to fly currently.
Delta more than any other U.S. airline has prided itself – and sold itself – on reliability. They’ve gone over a month at a time without a mainline flight cancellation, and hit 200 days in a year without a mainline cancellation. The day before Thanksgiving would traditionally be a ‘no cancel’ day where the airline would go to tremendous lengths (including 20 hour flight ‘delays’ with different crew and aircraft) doing anything possible to avoid classifying a flight as cancelled. That didn’t work this year.
According to a Delta spokesperson,
Delta teams are working diligently to prevent flight cancellations this week. A number of factors have pressured our ability to timely staff several dozen scheduled flights on Wednesday. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our customers.
If a flight is canceled or significantly rescheduled by Delta, customers are proactively contacted with new flight details and have the options of adjusting their new booking, receiving eCredit for future travel or seeking a refund. The vast majority of customers are being rebooked for a flight during the same travel day.
Delta is committed to keeping middle seats blocked through March 30, 2021 and giving customers a multi-layered, comprehensive safe and clean experience as part of the Delta CareStandard
I understand that Delta added several flights for the Thanksgiving holiday in October, after November’s schedule had been ‘put out to bid’ by crews. These “open time” flights need to either be picked up by employees wanting more hours, or by those scheduled to work reserve. Why this created more of a problem than in normal times is something I’m trying to work through.
What do you expect when Delta tells people it’s so unsafe to fly that they have to block middles seats and provide no real in-flight service? So when the CDC says “stay home” and “don’t travel” what do you expect?
Nick, what does that have to do with cancelling flights – are you saying they are choosing to cancel them due to lower demand?
@Nick I’m not sure what you are saying here. This blog post doesn’t even give a reason for the delays compared to other carriers. If you are afraid to fly, stay home. Besides the so-called authorities are telling people not to fly but are traveling themselves. The Denver Mayor is an example of this.
BLAME MSM… lies, lies, lies til Trump walks away.
Pilots are calling in sick and not willing to work on holidays. Pilots are selfish; plain and simple.
The United cancellations you report are mostly cargo/charter (UA27XX/28XX) flights. Few, if any pax cancellations.
Sounds like Delta is having a difficult time staffing these flights. Pilots or FAs?
Maybe another example where employees are refusing to work preferring to stay home and get paid some other way?
Delta’s Pilot union just agreed to concessions, I doubt the motivation to work extra hours from the rank and file is there.
I had a rep tell me with regard to transpacific flights that they expect flights with under a profitable threshold of passengers to be cancelled and that the affected passengers will call as a self-consolidating mechanism. Flights appear to be offered for each day when booking, but eventually instead of say seven per week, only three may end up going, and everyone on the unluckily cancelled other four must call to get on the two remaining flights that week (or else get refunded). This happened to me and the plane wasn’t full but wasn’t empty either.
Crew calling in sick . It was nasty at ATL this morning.
They could recall some of there recent retired Flight Attendants. They have lost the Best of the Best. Our Flight Attendants loved flying some of them would come back to help for a while.
@deedee – get some help already…seriously. Mental illness is real and affects many these days.
[redacted] @Deedee once again injecting politics into something that has nothing to do with politics. So sorry that everything triggers you, [redacted]
@ Gary – Thats what DL execs get for being so greedy.
I have 2000000 miles on DL. They went way left as they are globalists. I won’t fly them again.
@ Deedee — Truno won’t stop lying after he “walks away”. All he has done his entire life is lie. If you are stupid enough to believe him, I feel sorry for you.
@ Deedee — Trump not Truno….
@ Larry — Where is this imaginary right-leaning airline? Spirit or Allegiant? Maybe ex-President Trump can start an airline. Oh, right, he already failed at that, too.
Pilots and flight attendants get paid a lot extra for working on major holidays. Not all are calling out.
Plain and simple, they don’t have enough pilots available to fly. They placed 1700 in a temporary furlough category and then added a significant amount of flights. There are plenty of pilots, but DAL made the decision to not have those pilots available to fly in order to save costs and then added way more flights over the holidays than they could realistically ever fly.
Lots of pilots/FA’s calling out for various reasons. No crew, no flight. Feel bad for all those at crew scheduling, they have more flights than bodies. Delta either needs to start hiring again or put down the gavel.
Isn’t the most obvious explanation usually the correct one? And, in this case, wouldn’t that be that airlines loaded capacity hoping for a big Thanksgiving weekend, the demand didn’t materialize due to the COVID spike, and they cut flights due to low loads? (Fairly certain that this is what the very first post is *trying* to say, btw). Seems logical to me.
Nice to hear. It couldn’t happen to a more Greedy Airline.
Being in the industry, Delta employees have what basically amounts to Stockholm Syndrome. I flew their lift when I flew RJ’s. I called the company that does their applications and told them to pull my application from their file. I met Ed Bastian while sitting on a jumpseat riding home. No thanks.
Deedee
What’s MSM?
I just recently flew Delta 2 weeks ago. Yes no middle seats yet there were no delays tbe plane was spotless and staff was on time and normal flight service. Could not have had a better flight. Delta has never said it is unsafe to fly! I am tested regularly for covid and after flying still negative
Just take another 25% pay cut
Everyone is making too much money anyway.
Memo from Corporate!!
With sky-high Covid cases and deaths in the US, and with Thanksgiving leisure travelers possibly being among the more likely to take more risks that usual during a pandemic, can’t say that I blame DL employees for being reluctant to work on what could be the busiest travel day so far during this pandemic in the US.
If DL front-line employees and all their near and dear ones they see had great paid sick leave and paid family leave benefits to count on when one or more household member/relative gets sick (or stuck at home) for a prolonged period due to Covid-19, then perhaps this would play out differently.
A safer and healthier America is an America where being employed means the employees have a paid sick leave and paid family medical leave that works to allow people to work knowing that when things go wrong the floor won’t fall out from under their feet.
Couldnt happen to a crappier airline. They suck and they deserve what they get. Over 30 years ago, after a couple very serious mistreatments by their flight staff (with zero response from corporate), I swore them off and wished them nothing but to go out of business as soon as possible. Well looks like my wish is coming true. I’ve never flown them since and know of many other folks who have been mistreated as well. Goodbye Delta. You suck and deserve every bad thing coming your way as fast as possible. The next thing we will read is how they have to beg the government to bail them out some more because they just don’t know how to treat paying customers right or manage money. Just go away already, we don’t need you Delta. Wishes do come true!
WTF?! I make a comment on delusional Deedee and get censored for calling her a snowflake? That’s a word that needs redaction? Really? No problem letting others spew much worse and call people terrible names, but snowflake is what crosses the line? What’s going on, Gary? Is she your wife?
Pilots and flight attendants get paid a lot extra for working on major holidays, DMC? Wrong. They receive the same pay as any other day. Brush up on your knowledge before spouting these untruths. Incredible.
Mike Smith is absolutely right. Im a pilot for Delta, and I would LOVE to fly this week but I’ve been curbed into a temporsry status along with a few thousand other pilots where wee are not even permitted to fly. It pains me to see passengers inconvenienced like this. Please know that all Delta pilots take a lot of pride in giving you the best customer service and we would be there for you if we were allowed to be. Happy Thanksgiving all.
Delta stumbling and an aggressive, nimble UNITED rising
These “open time” flights need to either be picked up by employees wanting more ours, or by those scheduled to work reserve.
– quote, from this article
I believe it’s spelled “hours”, not “ours”.
Ive read all the comments and Mike Smith is right. Sick calls are not elevated over any predictable pattern over prior years and staffing formulas already account for that. The actual problem is executives decided to play hardball with pilots by forcing a large number into lower paying categories, hoping the group would agree to concessions sooner. They eventually got some concession, but the initial impulse of pushing thousands of people into lower categories has now resulted in staffing shortages when anything resembling normal demand returns. Many of these guys haven’t even trained yet and couldn’t fly if they wanted to, it takes months to get through the backlog. Poor management by Bastian in both good times and bad.
Thanks Gary thanks to your timely post
delta canceled my 530 pm flight in first class and offered me
a 618 AM departure with a 5 hour layover in its place 🙁
Refund please
On southwest non stop tomorrow .Just get me home!
This is the first Thanksgiving that no one in my family is flying. I always seemed to get sick after being in a box with recirculated air. Why fly?
Holy crap, most of you are idiots.
Don’t get too happy @Greg United’s top brass have gotten rid of most of the Continental corporate people. United went bancrupt
Ridiculous…. and the politicians bailed this garbage out… i guess people got what they voted for… serves them right for voting for the repubtards and dumbocrats.
They needed more people period. Flight crews, ground services, etc. Then there are other factors, such as LAX now (today, the day before Thanksgiving) requiring anyone over 16 to have a health form filled out or face a fine.
I know for a fact certain stations are severely understaffed, alot of flight crews timed out, etc. It would have helped if people were brought out of furlough for the holiday season.
They furloughed many pilots and then need those left to pick up extra flights to cover the added schedule. It is an unspoken rule that you don’t pick up extra flying when you have brother and sister pilots out on furlough. If they wanted to cover the flights, they should have furloughed less or waited until later to furlough. Now they will try to blame the pilots when all the pilots did was choose to not pick up extra days of flying around the holidays and instead decided to be home with their families. It is very doubtful there was a massive amount of sick calls unless Covid is running through their ranks kind of like America in general.
Pilots must follow FAR, FAA and contract regulations. Crew schedulers are now clerks with little expertise in these regs and depend on computer programs to cover flights. So, many pilots went illegal just when the increased flying started this week. (They must have a certain amount of rest between trips, for example). When I was a scheduler, back in the day, we had intense training and knew flight legalities. IMO
This must be devastating news for the Delta fan boys and girls. Delta can do no wrong.
The real story: About 95% of the cancellations are due to lack of crew. After the CARES Act was signed into law, Delta management made the decision to displace a lot of pilots out of widebody jets (higher paying) and into narrowbody jets (lower paying). They then offered an early retirement plan that about 13% of our more senior pilots took. This left a lot of cockpits back on the widebodies that needed to be filled. So then they offered these new positions for the pilots to bid on. Pilots can’t just start flying new airplanes overnight. The training takes about a month and a half. There are literally 1000s of pilots sitting at home, willing to fly, but due to the whipsawing that management has put us through, we are stacked up like cordwood waiting for simulators to open up so we can be trained. Meanwhile, due to reduced flying in the spring and summer, many pilots went non-current for landings. So these pilots are also waiting for simulator openings so they can get re-current to legally fly. In addition to all of this, management also placed the bottom 12% of our seniority list in a holding pattern, threatening furloughs, and removing them from aircraft. Pilots are NOT calling in sick. We are here. We want to fly. But we’ve been hamstrung by a management team that cut costs to the bone, and now they can’t deliver for the most important travel holiday of the year. If you think its bad now, wait until Christmas, Spring Break, and next summer. This problem will not go away for awhile.
Delta has hundreds of ready and willing pilots sitting home this month. Delta had planned to furlough them, so they were not scheduled to work at all. Believe me these pilots would love to be flying. Delta had the resources but didn’t use them.
I’m certainly no Delta fan boy. Actually I’ve probably been the most vocal critic of Delta SkyMiles that Flyertalk ever had. 😀
But despite my dislike for what Delta has done in the frequent flyer program space and the other customer-unfriendly moves its made over the years so as to either enable or lead the race to the bottom with the “you are your fare this time” approach, I must say that Delta management seems more capable of recovering from own-goals and industry challenges than American and United for quite some time. Maybe this begins to mark Delta’s return to the mean with mediocre industry management, but I wouldn’t take this situation as a sure sign of major operational disasters in 2021 and beyond for Delta. If anything, maybe this is just the wake-up call Delta needs to better avoid reaching AA and UA levels of “service”.
I canceled my delta flight cause I bought it in advanced cause it was a one way.
And then they changed it without even notifying me and tried to trick me into a 2 way flight
And changed my dates and times without my permission
People are most likely canceling cause of that
Bad weather in Atl all day.
Guwonder
Delta has better pay and sick
Leave than
most and zero furloughs