When Southwest Airlines melted down for days on end over Christmas 2022, they were lambasted across the media. Delta’s situation over the past several days is nearly as bad, but they aren’t getting nearly the same bad press.

Perhaps it’s that Southwest’s problems happened over Christmas, triggered initially by insufficient staffing to cover bad weather events and IT systems that couldn’t handle a reboot of their operation. Or maybe it’s that they were unique in their problems while initially other airlines faced similar challenges to Delta. Is Delta getting a pass for its inability to recover its operation because it began with CrowdStrike, which gave other airlines and even Starbucks an initial pause too?

Regardless, on Sunday American Airlines cancelled 2% of its flights – despite bad weather in Texas! – while Delta cancelled 36%. And Delta is still spinning a positive story rather than taking responsibility. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called Delta CEO Ed Bastian ‘reminding Bastian about his airline’s responsibilities to passengers’ over the weekend.

For the last decade I’ve flown first class @Delta for every single flight.

Never again.

Y’all just lost a customer for life.

Horrible customer service. Cancelled flights with no reimbursement. No answers from anyone.

RIP, @Delta, you’re dead to me. pic.twitter.com/ln7AJAr0j1

— Jason Helmes (@anymanfitness) July 22, 2024

Delta’s most recent statement is full of falsehoods.

• It begins by claiming “Delta continued its operational recovery Sunday” when Sunday’s operation was worse than Saturday’s.

• The airline blames “an outside vendor technology issue” when competitors were affected by Friday’s CrowdStrike outage, but recovered from it. Delta’s crew scheduling melted down, stranding employees who couldn’t get attached to flights. Delta’s customer service collapsed. Yet they try to suggest it’s not their fault, because CrowdStrike’s issues “prompted the airline and many others to pause flying for several hours on Friday.” It’s not Friday anymore.

• While employees “were working tirelessly to care for customers” the airline was not in fact “put[ting] flight crews and aircraft back in position” and it wasn’t fair to characterize the disruption as over (that this was happening “following the disruption”).

• I’m not sure how they can claim to be “notifying customers about delays and cancellations in their itinerary via the Fly Delta app” when the app crashed for so many?

• Though they claim to be “working to make it right for our customers” but they aren’t doing nearly as much for customers as what Southwest did. Recall that Southwest reimbursed the cost of travel on other airlines to get customers where they were going – and there weren’t a lot of last minute seats open for Christmas so paying out to customers cost them up to $400 million. Delta is not doing this.

Delta vs. United in Minneapolis. And I picked the wrong team, my friends. pic.twitter.com/1FibWqXiMC

— Brian Brenberg (@BrianBrenberg) July 22, 2024

Southwest took responsibility, though their CEO hid from the media for several days. Where is Delta’s CEO? Literally every statement Delta is making deflects responsibility and blame for their meltdown. Why is Delta so successful in deflecting blame and avoiding scrutiny when Southwest was not?

As Joe Brancatelli writes,

[Delta] doesn’t seem to have the corporate humility to admit that it’s fallen and can’t get up. It may try to limp its way back to whatever passes as normal.

Either way, Delta is not fit to fly right now. It will surely have to extend its travel waiver again, but, even if it doesn’t, you shouldn’t waste your time, energy and patience hoping Delta will get you where you need to go.

It is clear that you do not want to be a Delta customer even today, which hopefully will be better than the past three days. As of 6 a.m. Eastern the carrier has ‘only’ scrubbed 15% of its flights while American is at 1% and United 0%.