Skift Take
Demand for air travel remains strong as long as airline and air traffic control technology works.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian made a call to action for more funding and investment in the U.S. air traffic control system after an outage Wednesday disrupted more than 11,000 flights across the country.
"It's very clear that there has to be a call to action amongst our political leaders, the Congress and the White House, to fund and properly provide the FAA the resources they need to do the job," Bastian said during the Atlanta-based carrier's fourth-quarter results call on Friday.
The flight disruptions occurred after a corrupted file forced an overnight reboot of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, system that communicates safety notices to pilots. The system is reportedly 30 years old. The regulator instituted a nationwide ground stop for all departing flights at 7 a.m. EST on Wednesday when it could not confirm that messages were being relayed to crews. The ground stop was lifted by 9 a.m EST but not before flight delays and cancellations had rippled across the country.
Delta and its affiliates delayed at least 1,585 flights and cancelled another 94 flights on Wednesday, data from flight tracking website FlightAware show.
The FAA outage came less than two weeks after technology was cited as the main cause of a meltdown at Southwest Airlines over the Christmas and New Year holidays. That event, while triggered by bad weather, resulted in the cancellation of more than 16,700 flights and cost Southwest as much as $825 million in the fourth quarter.
Calls to modernize the U.S. air traffic cont