Air travel can be full of drama, but one Delta Air Lines flight this week between London and Detroit had a lot more baggage than usual.
On Monday, a Delta Airbus A330-200 jet left London Heathrow Airport without any human passengers. Instead, Delta used the jet to ferry tons of delayed luggage after extraordinary operational disruptions triggered chaos at the London hub.
Overwhelmed and understaffed, London Heathrow Airport made an alarming announcement this week, telling airlines to stop selling tickets for summer travel because it simply cannot handle the volume.
Thousands of passengers have waited for hours in security queues at the London hub, many of them missing their flights. Amid the chaos, stranded baggage has piled up in the terminal.
And that’s how Delta’s luggage-only flight came to be.
Delta canceled a London Heathrow-Detroit flight on Monday and rebooked those customers on other flights. As a result, Delta had an Airbus A330-200 available without customers to board.
But there were still hundreds of bags stranded at Heathrow from earlier flights that needed to get back to Delta customers in the U.S.
Instead of flying the jet completely empty as a repositioning flight, Delta turned to what it called “a creative solution.” Staff loaded the baggage hold of Delta flight 9888 from Heathrow to Detroit with 1,000 delayed bags to fly them back to the United States and forward onto customers.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian called it “a separate charter just to repatriate bags back to customers that had been stranded because of some of the operational issues the European airports were having,” during remarks Wednesday on the company’s financial results.
“And we did that on our own nickel just to reunite our Delta customers to their bags as quickly as possible,” he said.
Acknowledging it cannot handle the volumes coming through, London Heathrow said it will put a cap on the number of passengers it will handle through Sept. 11.
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, where Delta partner KLM has its hub, has also been severely understaffed this summer and capped passenger volumes. Delta partner Air France’s Paris hub has faced labor unrest this summer.
“The European airports don’t have the staff,” Bastian said. “We’re working with our airports, with our partners, people on the ground.”
It’s yet to be seen how the understaffing and limits on passengers will affect Delta flight cancellations in Europe for the rest of the summer.
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