Delta meltdown is Buttigieg’s latest headache

Buttigieg and his regulators have vast power to act when flight safety is threatened, including grounding planes, yanking airlines’ approvals to operate and even forcing manufacturers like Boeing to halt their assembly lines. In a statement, a Delta spokesperson said it had made the “independent decision to temporarily expand our reimbursement policy,” after “considerable customer feedback.” The spokesperson added that “next to safety, Delta’s number one priority is to take care of our customers and our people, something we will continue to do as we recover from the unprecedented affect on our operation from the CrowdStrike outage.” In an interview, Buttigieg said his investigation will look at what went wrong and why the effects of the CrowdStrike glitch were so pronounced at Delta and not other airlines, and the extent to which Delta met its responsibilities to its customers. “We need to understand how that happened.” He said his agency “set out to launch a different era of accountability” with the Southwest fine, and that while it’s “too soon to say what the Delta investigation will lead to, … we’re going to stay with that new higher standard versus the level of enforcement that we inherited.” A new DOT rule and recent changes to aviation law will require airlines to issue prompt refunds for flight cancellations and lengthy delays, though that full authority won’t be in place until October. Though other airlines recovered quickly from the snafu, Delta CEO Ed Bastian on Wednesday conceded that his company’s “initial efforts to stabilize the operations were difficult and frustratingly slow and complex.” Delta on Wednesday amended its refund policy to temporarily reimburse passengers for travel booked on other airlines, and in a statement said it’s “committed to caring for our customers during this time and has taken a number of other steps to make things right for customers affected by delays and cancellations.” A flight departure information board is seen Tuesday at Ronald Reagan Airport. “We cannot have one of the four largest airlines in the U.S. acting like someone who is a person going in and out of a coma.” He added that, given the massive failure, Delta did not “do an adequate enough assessment of their software and potential weaknesses.” Similar to the Southwest debacle, the CrowdStrike failure forced Delta to manually reboot each of its systems affected by the outage, and another internal system used to match flight crews and schedules was upended from these disruptions.