Passengers wait after the lights went out at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Sunday, Dec. 17, 2017, in Atlanta. A sudden power outage at the airport on Sunday grounded scores of flights and passengers during one of the busiest travel times of the year.
- A power outage left Delta's main hub in Atlanta without power for 11 hours on Sunday.
- The airline did not have any outage-related flight cancellations after 1 pm on Monday.
- Delta Air Lines reported on Tuesday that more than 90% of its Atlanta flights arrived on time.
Delta's flight operations have recovered after a catastrophic power outage shut down the airline's home base at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for 11 hours on Sunday.
The airline's operations returned to normal on Tuesday after canceling roughly 1,400 flights on Sunday and Monday. According to Delta, more than 90% of its Atlanta flights arrived on time. The airline also has not had any outage-related cancellations after 1 pm on Monday. In addition, Delta announced that all of its affected customers have been accommodated on alternate flights.
This week's performance by the second largest airline in the world show's a marked improvement over previous incidents where its operations were severely disrupted.
In April, it took Delta roughly a week to recover from a series of severe storms that rolled through Atlanta; forcing it to cancel 4,000 flights. That disruption cost the airline $125 million in lost revenue.
In August 2016, a failure at one of its data centers shut down Delta's computer system and kept its 1,000-plane fleet grounded for about six hours. It took the better part of a week for the airline's operations to recover with roughly 2,000 flights canceled. That incident cost Delta $150 million.
This time around it took less than a full day after power was restored around midnight on Sunday for operations to recover.
According to Delta, the quick recovery can be attributed to a series of preventive measures the airline has recently undertaken. This includes an irregular operation or IROPS team tasked with coordinating the airline's response to disruptive events. In addition, the airline has adjusted the placement of crew and aircraft around its network to better handle unforeseen situations.
Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest airport in the world and handles more than 104 million passengers a year. The facility went dark around 1 pm on Sunday. Georgia Power, the airport's utility provider, believes the outage was caused by an underground electrical fire. According to Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, the intense fire not only knocked out the airport's primary power network but also its backup system.