Flights resume after airport blaze, blackout

ATLANTA: Delta Air Lines and other carriers that operate out of this city’s busy airport said they expected to be running normally yesterday after a fire and blackout forced the cancellation of at least 1 500 flights days before the start of the Christmas rush.

A spokesperson for Delta, by far the biggest airline at the world’s busiest airport, said most of its delayed passengers had been booked on flights scheduled to leave on Monday.

Spokesperson Michael Thomas said the airline should be “largely, if not completely” back to normal by yesterday, well before the huge travel weekend ahead of Christmas Day.

But passengers trying to catch morning flights yesterday faced waits of up to an hour just to get through the main security checkpoint in the domestic terminal, the airport’s website showed at dawn.

No matter how fast Delta and other airlines move, it will take a few days to get the hundreds of thousands of grounded passengers to their final destinations, said Robert Mann, president of an airline consulting firm in Port Washington, New York. In rare cases, some passengers won’t arrive until tomorrow, he said.

The nation’s air-travel system was snarled after the underground blaze knocked out electricity on Sunday and paralysed Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for about 11 hours.

Southwest, the airport’s second-largest airline, said on Monday it was back on a normal schedule, but a spokesperson could not say how long it would take to clear the backlog of stranded travellers.

American Airlines, which is much smaller, said that it, too, booked many of its passengers on new flights but that some would have to wait until later in the week to fly.

The fire broke out on Sunday afternoon next to equipment for a back-up system, causing that to fail, too. Power wasn’t fully restored until about midnight.

The control tower did not lose power because it has a separate electrical feed, and planes that were in the air and close to Atlanta when the blackout hit were allowed to land. Other incoming flights were diverted, and outgoing flights were halted.

Anthony Foxx, who was transportation secretary under President Barack Obama, was among the many travellers stuck for hours in a plane on the tarmac. He blasted airport officials, saying the problem was “compounded by confusion and poor communication”.

“Total and abject failure here at ATL Airport today,” he tweeted, adding that there was “no excuse for lack of workable redundant power source. None!”

Georgia Power chief executive Paul Bowers issued an apology and blamed the fire on a failure in a switch gear. He said the utility is considering a change in the set-up of the main and back-up systems to prevent a similar blackout.

At noon on Monday, stranded travellers sat on the floor, charging cellphones at the electrical outlets. An Atlanta city employee in a Santa hat gave out sweets.

David and Lynn Carden, sitting on soft chairs in the airport’s atrium, left London early on Sunday for Key West, Florida but were diverted to Cincinnati because of the blackout. Delta got them a hotel room and put them on a Monday flight to Atlanta. From there, they awaited an afternoon flight to Florida.

“Delta has been pretty good,” David Carden said, counting themselves luckier than passengers who spent the night in an airport.

Delta cancelled about 1 000 flights on Sunday and 400 more on Monday, in many cases because the pilots and planes were in the wrong places. To help clear the backlog, it added flights and found seats for some of its customers on other airlines.

Last year, Delta was crippled by a storm in the South, and it took the airline five days, and 4 000 cancelled flights, before it fully recovered.

Thomas said since then the airline had put more flight crews on reserve and installed computer technology to quickly assemble properly rested crews.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport serves an average of 275 000 passengers a day. – AP