Despite thousands of flight cancellations and days of travel disruption during the CrowdStrike crisis last summer, Delta Air Lines has maintained its perch atop the 2024 North American on-time rankings by aviation analytics firm Cirium.
It’s the seventh consecutive time the Atlanta-based airline has secured the continent’s highest performance ranking, with 83.5% of flights arriving at the gate within 15 minutes of the scheduled arrival time.
“You may think we are biased, but we are not,” said Mike Malik, Cirium’s chief marketing officer, of the winning streak.
Globally, Cirium found Delta’s on-time performance came in third behind Aeromexico and Saudia Airlines. According to the most recent U.S. Department of Transportation data through September, Delta had an 87% on-time arrival rate in 2024.
The airline’s recovery after CrowdStrike was “superb,” Malik said.
“Yeah, they did have a number of bad days in the middle of the year, but you have to remember this award and the (on-time performance) numbers are measured over 365 days,” he said.
The July 19 outage was caused by a defective software update by CrowdStrike, Delta’s cybersecurity provider, to the airline’s computers. It crippled Delta’s operations for five days and caused about 7,000 flight cancellations. Stranded travelers slept in airport terminals and struggled to reach their destinations.
Months later, the incident is being litigated in several courts. The airline is facing a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of customers seeking compensation. Delta is in turn suing CrowdStrike, arguing it suffered $500 million in damages and blaming its vendor for inserting a “faulty” software update and cutting corners.
CrowdStrike countersued, arguing it quickly fixed its mistake, pointing out that other customers were able to recover quickly, and saying “it was Delta’s own response and IT infrastructure that caused delays in Delta’s ability to resume normal operation.”
CrowdStrike’s complaint alleges the company “in no way acted grossly negligent or committed willful misconduct and certainly did not cause the harm that Delta claims.”
“We learned a lot,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian told Bloomberg in November of the incident.
“We thought we were surrounded by the very best that you can protect yourself with both CrowdStrike and Microsoft. And we realized that you can’t take these guys at anywhere close to face value in terms of what they tell you they’re responsible for.”
He said the airline has “already made some pretty significant changes in our technology security infrastructure to prevent that from ever happening again.”
Delta has held Cirium’s North American on-time title every year since 2017, except in 2020 when the ranking was paused due to COVID-19.
While Malik praised Delta’s “impeccable” performance, he noted “one thing to watch out for in North America is at the heels of Delta is United Airlines,” which he said continues to increase its own on-time performance.
The airline sat just a few percentage points below its Atlanta-based competitor in 2024.
