Delta racks up remarkable reliability record

Neat seats, fine food, innovative in-flight entertainment—all things airlines tend to tout when they talk about service. But precious little of that matters if your flight’s cancelled and you’re left to stew at the gate. That cancellation is especially galling if it’s maintenance-related.

That’s why Delta Air Lines’ announcement that it just racked up a record 185 days of zero mainline (non-regional jet) maintenance cancellations so far this year is so significant. Consider for a moment that the airline operates some 3,500 mainline departures daily and you put the number in perspective.

How did Delta do it? “Aviation is the ultimate team sport,” says Senior Vice President of Technical Operations Don Mitacek. To successfully compete at the megacarrier level, and compete consistently, TechOps has boosted infrastructure by making sure the right aircraft parts are in the right place at the right time. Delta uses sophisticated analytic tools to do this. In addition, since 2012, the airline has opened several new “line” maintenance stations throughout its route network.

Maintenance plays an important role when it comes to reliability. But Delta as a whole has established “D0”—zero delays—as the one clear goal across all its working groups. D0 doesn’t take into account the weather. Rather it’s focused on controllable factors: maintenance, crew scheduling and the like. Coordinating the drive for D0 is the airline’s Operations Control Center at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the planet’s busiest airport in terms of passenger traffic.

From the surprisingly hushed, muted floor of the Star Wars-like OCC at any one time 350 to 400 people go about their jobs: flight dispatchers, maintenance personnel, pilots, and meteorologists. In all, representatives from some 30 of the airline’s departments are present.

The end product—they hope—is to better that 185-day tally of no maintenance cancellations, and keep up the pressure in pursuit of zero delays.