Atlanta was hit hard by a hailstorm Friday evening, as thousands of flights were delayed and cancelled. The world’s busiest airport was forced to close for a period of time, and the effects are expected to linger throughout this weekend.
According to Flightradar24, Atlanta had an average departure delay of 182 minutes and an average arrival delay of 151 minutes at 22:40 EDT on Friday. Over 230 flights (and counting) were cancelled.
The thunderstorm and eventual hailstorm began at around 7pm EST. A couple of things to know about this storm:
- The ATC Tower lost power and was evacuated. This closed the airport entirely; I know flights weren’t going to get in and out of ATL anyway with the storm, but this effectively confirmed that the airport would not reopen for a lengthy time.
- The hailstorm required many aircraft to return to the gate for inspection. This slowed the process of the airport reopening, and many inbound flights arriving after the storm had to wait a long time for a gate to open (I observed several aircraft waiting over 5 hours on the taxiway for a gate).
Plenty of flights were diverted during the storm to airports such as Charlotte, Jacksonville, Savannah, and more. This Turkish Airlines flight above, for example, diverted to Charlotte and completed a 38 minute repositioning flight after the storm cleared. You can also see many aircraft sitting on the taxiway waiting for gates to open.
A Potential Delta Meltdown?
These events certainly have the potential to lead to a meltdown for Delta. With the high number of sudden cancellations in a short period of time, thousands of passengers need to be rebooked and rerouted this weekend, in addition to flight crews now being all over the place.
This, of course, is happening at Delta’s largest hub and the world’s biggest airport. The volume of passengers experiencing these delays and cancellations is massive.
This Reddit user described the current situation at Atlanta as of 2:00 EST in the morning. They mentioned that the lines at the help desk in each concourse are “outrageous” with “1,200+ people,” a 3 hour wait for the phone line, and they’re unable to rebook via the app. They added that they were number 294 for the help desk.
Other users have noted being told that “…there is no getting out of Atlanta except specific flights until Sunday afternoon.”
Delta underwent the infamous Cloudstrike/IT meltdown last summer, which hindered operations throughout its network for an extended period of time. I don’t expect this to be nearly as bad as last year’s, but these comments definitely echo the Cloudstrike meltdown. It’ll be interesting to see how they recover this weekend.
I’ll continue to cover this on this blog should we get more development. The best of luck for those flying through Atlanta right now…
Featured image by the author.
