The couple had made stops in Nairobi and Amsterdam and landed shortly after the lights went out in Atlanta. Sara Melillo, who was traveling to Pittsburgh from Kenya, where she lives with her husband, Greg Presto, to spend Christmas with his family were stuck on the tarmac for six hours. "This is the worst experience I've ever had at an airport," he said. That wasn't enough to comfort Jeff Smith, 46, of Pittsburgh, who ended up stuck in a plane on the tarmac for three hours after it landed. The utility said there are "many redundant systems in place" to ensure the power supply to the airport and that such outages at the airport "are very rare." No areas outside of the airport were affected by the power loss.
"No personnel or passengers were in danger at any time," the statement said. The fire was next to equipment for a backup system, causing that to also fail. The FAA said the tower could operate normally but flights were affected because airport equipment in the terminals was not working.Īccording to a Georgia Power statement, the utility believes a piece of equipment in an underground electrical facility may have failed, causing the fire. The FAA said it would staff the airport control tower throughout the night so that it can handle flights once they resume. "I mean there was 40 or 50 people per the terminal area that were confined to wheelchairs and some that couldn't get through the airport very well, some of them actually couldn't walk and there was no plan at all to get them out of here without any power."īeatty said passengers carried those who used wheelchairs down stairs. Passenger James Beatty said there was no real method for evacuation. "The people were helpless, they can't get down the stairs. "They had these elderly people, handicapped people lined up in wheelchairs," said stranded passenger Rutia Curry. "It's a nightmare."Īdding to the nightmare are what some passengers said was a lack of information from airport officials and help from first responders to get the disabled and the elderly through the airport without the use of escalators and elevators. "A lot of people are arriving, and no one is going out. She said restaurants and shops were closed.
She said police made passengers who were in the baggage claim area move to a higher floor. The city of Atlanta provide shuttle service to the Georgia Convention Center on Sunday for travelers in need of a place to stay.ĭelta passenger Emilia Duca, 32, was on her way to Wisconsin from Bogota, Colombia, when she got stuck in Atlanta. The airline also diverted three planes that were headed to Atlanta when the outage struck, sending them instead to Dallas, Nashville and back to Philadelphia. American Airlines canceled 24 departures and an equal number of arrivals, said spokesman Ross Feinstein.
Other airlines also canceled flights for the rest of Sunday. At the time, CEO Ed Bastian vowed Delta would make "significant improvements" to its system for scheduling and tracking aircraft crews to recover more quickly from disruptions. Like Sunday's outage, that April storm hit Delta's largest hub at a busy travel time when there weren't many empty seats to accommodate customers from cancelled flights.
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