Most people stick with one airline or system. So their non-refundable tickets are all on Delta or whoever. It’s very, very rarely a case of buying a ticket on Delta to Atlanta and United from Atlanta. And then having United say “well it’s Delta’s fault you never got here, so we’re not refunding your money.”
Based on recent history for things like snowstorms, you can bet that cancellation and change penalties will be waived by almost all airlines for almost all affected travelers.
The place money gets lost is the consequentials: You were taking a flight to a pre-paid cruise or a flight to a pre-paid resort. Depending on how the PR shapes up the cruise line or the resort may well decide not to refund anything for no-shows due to the ATL shutdown.
Systemically, there’s not enough capacity in the total airline system in the week before Christmas to reaccomodate everybody on some airline (even Delta) over some other hubs. Obviously the airport authority is trying like mad to get back to normal. Subject to the caveat that if they jury rig stuff they’re running an increased risk of a second failure.
I’m not following the play-by-play at all. This will be a B-school case study for years to come. Whether as a lesson on what to do or what not to do remains to be seen.
This seems like a crisis response case study too. Not only was there a single point of failure, there seems to have been no plan or training among the various authorities for dealing with the crowds in the airport and on the planes.
It says the switchgear failed. Isn’t that where the primary and backup power lines would come together anyway?
Seems to me, you can’t have a truly redundant power system unless you run two sets of wires (physically separate, not next to each other) to every electrical appliance and have a manual switch to select between the two.
As Tom Tildrum said, the problem seems to be not having a plan to recover when your single point of failure failed. Yes, all systems have single points of failure, pretty much. In this case it took them a long time to get access to the switch.
The last I read a piece of equipment failed and caused the fire.
My international flight back to the US was cancelled even though ATL was back up, because there was no plane to fly us in until one made the trip from the US.
Imagine you had two widely separated grid-level power lines to the airport perimeter. Let’s call them A & B. Now you run each feed line to a separate substation that’s physically far from the other. Now run from the A and the B substation you run a branch through a separate tunnel to each concourse and separately to the ticketing areas, fuel farms, ATC facilities, etc. So each of these buildings has two inputs, A & B, coming in to opposite ends or sides of the building.
Within each concourse, every other gate and every other set of overhead lights and every other bit of network gear or wifi hotspot is on the A or B system. If you have 2 escalators or elevators, one is on A and one is on B. There’s going to be multiple air handlers for the HVAC system. Half are on A and half are on B. etc., etc., etc. for each and every system in the building.
Same idea for the ATC facilities, the fuel farm, the ticket counters, the baggage system, etc.
What killed Atlanta was losing 100% of everything. If they’d had the same failure with the approach I described they’d have had every other gate & computer, partial air conditioning & lighting, etc. They’d still have had major schedule disruption. They would not have had 15,000 people trapped in the dark in unventilated buildings. Nor umpteen thousand trapped on airplanes with no way to get them out or refuel them so they could go elsewhere.
TLDR: It’s dual supply to a fairly large chunk of infrastructure, then within that chunk, it’s half one system and half the other. It doesn’t prevent partial failures. But it comprehensively prevents total failures.
Is there bad weather meaning there are a lot of planes stuck overhead, unable to divert to other airports? Now running dangerously low on fuel, and it just so happens a major terrorist leader is being transported into the airport that exact same day, AND on CHRISTMAS?!?!
There was a guy, I think Brazilian, at my neighbor’s Christmas party last night. (She’s Brazilian too.) He was stuck on one of those planes at Atlanta airport while all that was going on. Said it wasn’t too bad really, they kept handing out sandwiches and running the movies, so he just settled back and enjoyed.