At approximately 6:30 UTC (2:30 EDT) on Monday, 8 August Delta Air Lines experienced an equipment failure that prevented flights not already in the air from departing. Flights were held for roughly four hours, but the effects are still being felt as Delta returns to normal operations.
Effects on Flights
Delta flights that were already in the air when the outage occurred continued to their destinations without incident, however flights that had not yet departed were unable to take off. The video below shows Delta flights over the United States and Europe from the beginning of the outage to 12 hours later at 18:30 UTC (14:30 EDT). Peak impact on flights is at approximately 12:30 UTC (8:30 EDT) when there were no Delta flights in the air over the continental United States.
The #DeltaOutage and recovery. 06:30—18:30 UTC 8 Aug 2016. No US #Delta flights = 12:15 UTC https://t.co/2ifKusDe7b pic.twitter.com/4pzRwzCxKt
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) August 8, 2016
Cancellations and Delays
Delta canceled 870 flights on 8 August and a further 775 flights on 9 August. As of 16:30 UTC (12:30 EDT) 10 August, Delta has cancelled 278 flights. Delta operates an average of approximately 6000 flights per day during this time of year. Delta has stated that 75% of flights are now departing within 30 minutes of their scheduled departure time.
Hub Effects
The impact on Delta’s operations has been significant, but a macro view of Delta’s operations at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport shows how the the airline began to quickly recover. The video below shows 48 hours of Delta flight activity at its Atlanta hub from Sunday afternoon local time, prior to the outage, to Tuesday afternoon local time. Delta and its sub-carriers account for over 75% of flights in Atlanta.
48 hours of @Delta’s @ATLairport operations, interruption, and recovery from Sunday afternoon to this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/6YyHS72QuM
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) August 9, 2016
Tracking Delta Flights
To track Delta flights, use callsign filter ‘DAL’. Alternatively, view all active Delta flights on our airline data page.
