Why Travelers Should Start Preparing for the Next Airline Scheduling Meltdown

26.07.2024 - 19:37 / cntraveler.com / Ed Bastian / Brett Snyder / Delta Ceo

They are scenes straight out of a travel nightmare: Airline passengers, including unaccompanied minors, stranded for days in strange cities amid a cascading wave of flight cancellations—with little hope of catching a plane home in a hurry.

That was the reality for thousands of fliers this week as Delta struggled to recover from the widespread CrowdStrike technology outage that overturned its flight schedules. But Delta passengers aren’t alone in dealing with these frustrating scenarios. In December 2022, Southwest had a similar meltdown as storms caused chaos for its holiday operations. “These can happen for a variety of reasons,” says Brett Snyder, president of travel assistance firm Cranky Concierge. “Usually there is some trigger, poor weather in the case of Southwest in 2022 and the CrowdStrike faulty update for Delta. Then, when things get out of sorts too quickly, systems can fall behind and it makes it hard to recover.”

In Delta’s case, the tech failure affected the airline’s Microsoft Windows operating system, according to a statement to customers from Delta CEO Ed Bastian. “Delta has a significant number of applications that use that system, and in particular one of our crew tracking-related tools was affected and unable to effectively process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system shutdown,” read Bastian's statement.

That crew management software is a key piece of technology, according to Mike Arnot, an airline expert and founder of the aviation communications firm Juliett Alpha. “It has so many dimensions to factor, including the passage of time, individual flight crew members with rules governing their work hours, routes, aircraft, and location of all of these people and planes at that moment in time,” Arnot says. “However, sometimes it’s so bad, with planes and people so out of position, a huge number of flights need to be canceled to reset. They just have to take drastic action to reset the entire operation and get planes and people in position to start again.”

And though the CrowdStrike failure seems like an extenuating circumstance, passengers should nonetheless be preparing for the next airline schedule outage. “The bad news is that these meltdowns happen all of the time, and somewhat predictably, every year,” Arnot says. “You might not remember the last major thunderstorm and heavy rain to hit LaGuardia or Denver, but the airline operations centers sure do. And every June or September, Florida has mini-meltdowns during hurricane season, where hundreds of flights are delayed and canceled. It’s just doesn’t make major news. But travelers sure feel it.”

Here’s what travelers should know if they’re ever caught in a airline schedule meltdown—big or small.

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