After ‘worst-case scenario’ weather, Delta insists it’s on track for July 4

But with just two cancellations on Monday as of midday, Delta says its operations have recovered and it is ready for the busy July Fourth travel weekend.

Storms with hail and high winds developed right over the airport at about 6 p.m. Friday and planted themselves there for hours, National Weather Service meteorologist Christa Smith told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday.

“They wouldn’t have been able to really run the airport much for 3½ hours,” she said. “It’s basically a worst-case scenario in terms of operations at the airport.”

That’s because it was a particularly large, slow-moving cell that covered both eastern and western airplane approach paths and had no breaks to sneak planes in and out, she explained.

The cancellations and delays piled up: More than 900 delays on Friday and 402 cancellations, according to FlightAware data.

Tom Dechman of Brookhaven was boarded for his Friday 7:25 p.m. flight to San Francisco to attend the wedding of two friends when the pilot announced they would wait on the tarmac for the storms.

Four hours later the plane was deboarded, and just after midnight they canceled the flight.

Dechman ended up waiting in line at a help desk until 5 a.m., after the chat and phone agents told him to seek help in person.

The Saturday morning flight was delayed so much that he had to give up and go home; he knew he wouldn’t be able to physically make the wedding if he wasn’t leaving by noon.

Dechman was frustrated that decisions to cancel flights weren’t made earlier and wondered why Delta didn’t open up Sky Clubs to some of the stranded passengers. “There were so many people that slept in the concourse because all the hotels and all the rental cars were gone,” he said.

While he quickly got a refund, he said the episode has tainted his opinion of the carrier. “I used to be pretty much all for Delta and now I’m like, they’re in the mix.”

However, he did note he was impressed watching some Delta employees work for hours to help passengers. “I saw several people stepping up trying to help.”

While Delta does not normally offer compensation for a disruption like weather that’s not its fault, company spokesperson Morgan Durrant told the AJC that Delta is reimbursing customers affected for hotel and meal costs.

Meteorologists knew there was a potential for storms earlier in the day, Smith said, and the airport and Delta received their standard twice-daily briefings on it.

But, she said, “You can’t really predict the exact location that storms will develop.”

Friday’s storm just happened to develop right on top of the airport and stay there.

Flash flood warnings were issued for the airport and nearby areas, the AJC reported.

The air traffic control tower had to be evacuated for high winds at about 10:30 p.m. that night and saw temporary power loss, Delta reported.

To make matters worse, about 100 Delta planes struck by pea-sized hail had to be reinspected before getting back in the air. All hail-affected planes were back in service as of Monday, Durrant said.

But Saturday evening brought another major storm that lasted another few hours, Smith said.

The snowballing effect on airplane operations grew to 1,000 flight cancellations and more than 3,000 delays from Friday to Monday.

Summer in Atlanta does tend to bring these storms, Smith said. “This is certainly the busy part of the year in terms of trying to get weather impacts for the airport together,” she said.

“Thunderstorms happen here all the time, and it’s just a matter of where they end up and how much movement they have.”

If a slow-moving storm “develops on top of you, you’ve got it for a while.”