Storm cancellations that dragged on for days to cost Delta $125 million

Delta Air Lines projected Wednesday that its five-day crisis of canceled flights after storms at its Atlanta hub will cost $125 million in revenue.

The airline canceled about 4,000 flights after storms repeatedly swept through Atlanta on April 5. Then confusion over crew assignments rippled for days as the airline tried to get crews to their planes and passengers to their destinations.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said it was the worst series of storms he’d seen in 20 years, halting operations at world's busiest airport for nearly an entire day. Seven waves of storms thrashed the region, with some spawning tornadoes.

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Bastian's comments came Wednesday during the company's quarterly earnings call.

Delta said operations returned to normal by Sunday afternoon. But while cancellations had subsided, its Monday operations were plagued with hundreds of delayed flights -- both on Delta itself and on its regional affiliates. By Tuesday, the airline that prides itself on completing nearly all of its flights, reported no cancellations and a mostly on-time "mainline" operation, though a higher-than-usual number of delays were still being reported on its regional affiliates, according to data from flight-tracking service FlightStats.

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Because the storms hit at a peak of spring-break travel, the airline had few empty seats to place passengers when their flights were canceled, Bastian said. Crew rotations were also disrupted and broken.

“We apologized,” Bastian said. “We certainly take full responsibility for making this better into the future.”

Bastian denied that the crisis resulted from a shortage of staffing. Delta is investing in information technology, to better track crews and tell them where they are needed, he said.

“We were literally running the airline hour by hour, in terms of where the crews were and getting them pieced back together,” Bastian said. “It was a very difficult process for us.”

With a snowstorm, Bastian said the airline would typically get flights out of the way and wait for it to pass. But these thunderstorms arrived with little warning.

“We were not able to get out of the way,” Bastian said. “It hit us as we were right in the middle of one of the busiest travel periods of the year.”

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