Page 8 - ATA

A4 U.S. NEWS
Tuesday 19 december 2017
Airlines inch back to normalcy after airport blackout

long it would take to clear here at ATL Airport to-
the backlog of stranded day,” he tweeted, add-
travelers. ing that there was “no ex-
American Airlines, which cuse for lack of workable
is much smaller, said that redundant power source.
it, too, booked many of its NONE!”
passengers on new flights Georgia Power CEO Paul
but that some will have to Bowers issued an apology
wait until later in the week and blamed the fire on a
to fly. failure in a switch gear. He
The fire broke out Sunday said the utility is consider-
afternoon next to equip- ing a change in the setup
ment for a backup system, of the main and backup
causing that to fail, too. systems to prevent a similar
Power wasn’t fully restored blackout.
until about midnight. Around noon Monday,
The control tower did not stranded travelers sat on
lose power because it has the floor, charging cell-
a separate electrical feed, phones at the electrical
and planes that were in outlets. An Atlanta city em-
the air and close to Atlanta ployee in a Santa hat gave
when the blackout hit were out candy.
allowed to land. Other in- David and Lynn Carden,
Travelers pass under the flight board showing cancellations in the North terminal on Monday Dec. coming flights were divert- sitting in soft chairs in the
18, 2017 at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta the day after a massive power out- ed, and outgoing flights airport’s atrium, left London
age brought operations to halt. Power was restored at the world’s busiest airport after a massive
outage Sunday afternoon that left planes and passengers stranded for hours, forced airlines to were halted. early Sunday for Key West,
cancel more than 1,100 flights and created a logistical nightmare during the already-busy holi- Anthony Foxx, who was Florida, but were diverted
day travel season. transportation secretary to Cincinnati because of
(John Spink/Atlanta Constitution via AP) under President Barack the blackout. Delta got
Continued from Front an airline consulting firm in just going to take a lot of Obama, was among many them a hotel room and put
But no matter how fast Del- Port Washington, New York. flights with four or five seats travelers stuck for hours in them on a Monday flight
ta and other airlines move, In rare cases, some passen- apiece,” Mann said. a plane on the tarmac. He to Atlanta. From there,
it will take a few days to get gers won’t arrive until Thurs- Southwest, the airport’s blasted airport officials, say- they awaited an afternoon
the hundreds of thousands day, he said. second-largest airline, said ing the problem was “com- flight to Florida.
of grounded passengers to “There are just so few it was back on a normal pounded by confusion and “Delta has been pretty
their final destinations, said seats available during a schedule, but a spokes- poor communication.” good,” David Carden
Robert Mann, president of peak holiday week, that’s man could not say how “Total and abject failure said, counting themselves
luckier than passengers
who spent the night in an
airport. “We don’t always
get this kind of customer
service in the U.K.”
College student Joe Ryan
had planned to fly home
to Chicago with his fiancee
on Sunday on American
after a four-day seminar
in Atlanta. They spent Sun-
day night on a carpeted
floor outside an elevator
and hoped to get standby
status on a Monday after-
noon flight. But he said he
was told it could be Tues-
day before he gets a flight
home.
Delta canceled about
1,000 flights Sunday and
400 more on Monday, in
many cases because the
pilots and airplanes were in
the wrong places. To help
clear the backlog, it add-
ed flights and found seats
for some of its customers
on other airlines.
Last spring, Delta was
crippled by a storm in the
South, and it took the air-
line five days — and about
4,000 canceled flights —
before it fully recovered.q