It’s not your imagination. Flying this summer was worse, Delta execs say.
The summer of 2025 “threw challenge after challenge at us,” Delta Air Lines executives wrote in a company-wide memo this week.
The Atlanta-based airline this summer saw a higher percentage of operations affected by weather than “in the recent past,” Chief of Operations John Laughter and Chief Customer Experience Officer Erik Snell wrote to employees.
There were irregular operations with significant delays or cancellations caused by weather or maintenance issues on 50 days from June to August — or more than half the summer. Contributing to some summer disruptions were unplanned maintenance issues with Delta’s Airbus A330 aircraft, officials said.
The carrier wasn’t alone. According to data from aviation analytics firm Cirium, no North American airlines made the top 10 list of the most on-time global airlines in June or July.
Among its U.S. peers, Delta’s on-time performance fell short of the top spot in June and narrowly came in first in July. By August, the Atlanta airline made it back onto the global top 10 list and held the top spot for North American on-time performance by more than 5 points.
“We’ve had a really tough summer,” CEO Ed Bastian told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Editorial Board last month.
“It seems like we’ve had storms almost every day … at a higher level than we’ve seen, certainly in many years, which causes great disruption for schedules.”
“This is the only business in the world where you thank God we’re at the end of summer,” he said.
Delta this year operated its largest schedule ever out of its hub in Atlanta, which is known for its summer thunderstorm season.
“Our job is not to use (the weather) as an excuse, it’s to be better equipped, be better prepared for it,” Bastian said.
“It’s tough on our people. It’s tough on our customers. It’s tough on the airport. Atlanta doesn’t hold a unique role in that. The Northeast has been really tough as well.”
According to Delta’s pilot and dispatcher unions, however, the disruptions were exacerbated by the airline’s own decisions.
Delta has failed to effectively prepare for “predictable weather events” that “cripple the operation,” they wrote in July.
Antiquated technology and crew tracking as well as tight staffing have left employees in “unacceptably difficult situations with significant operational pressure and inconsistent support,” union leadership wrote.
Bastian in response told the AJC the unions’ comments were “a little self-serving.”
“We have the very best people in crew tracking. We have some of the very best technologies that exist. It’s a hard business. All you have to look at is the data,” he said of the on-time performance metrics.
The Association of Flight Attendants, which has been trying to unionize Delta’s flight attendants for years, said it saw a “record” month of interest in unionization in June because of the summer storms.
“That was due to people realizing that during the (disruptions), they didn’t have the protections that other airline flight attendants had,” Delta flight attendant and AFA organizer Jonnie Lane told the AJC last month.
A330 maintenance
In the Sept. 8 memo, Laughter and Snell said they are focusing on a few priorities after the summer.
The company’s maintenance teams will leverage the airline’s smaller fall schedule to get “more touch-time with our aircraft” and ensure “fleet readiness.”
Flight cuts planned due to dampened global travel demand will “reduce the demand on our fleet,” they wrote.
Bastian told the AJC that Delta’s larger Airbus 330 aircraft in particular have seen “more maintenance requirements than normal” but that things have been “completely safe.”
A Delta A330 flying from Madrid to New York was forced to land in the Azores after an engine problem midflight in July, stranding passengers on a remote island for about 30 hours, CBS News reported.
“Because of the crashes and because of the media attention on it, yes everyone’s on edge,” Bastian said. “You have more media coverage of it but you don’t have more of those events.”
Delta spokesman Morgan Durrant told the AJC “some older A330s had to undergo some unplanned required maintenance … but it looks like there were no direct cancellations as a result.”
Bastian also noted when it comes to weather that turbulence has “picked up a fair bit.”
According to a study from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, clear-air turbulence is worsened by warmer air from carbon dioxide emissions, which increases wind shear in the jet streams.
A Delta flight from Salt Lake City to Amsterdam diverted to Minneapolis in July after experiencing “severe turbulence” over Wyoming. That event sent 18 passengers to the hospital.
In a preliminary report released this week, the National Transportation Safety Board said seven of the 10 cabin crew members sustained serious or minor injuries and a physician assistant coincidentally on board assisted with triage of passengers and crew.
Another priority coming out of the summer, Laughter and Snell wrote, is “continuing to invest in predictive tools” to support its operations and customer center team with more insights into the effects of operational decisions.
Bastian said when it comes to the company’s summer postmortem analysis, artificial intelligence is “a part of helping us connect these dots and try to understand better.”
And finally, the two leaders wrote, employees should make sure to communicate with customers frequently when travel is disrupted.
Remember to “update customers every 15 minutes, even when there is nothing new to share, and show empathy,” they wrote.
About the Author
As a business reporter, Emma Hurt leads coverage of the Atlanta airport, Delta Air Lines, UPS, Norfolk Southern and other travel and logistics companies. Prior to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she worked as an editor and Atlanta reporter for Axios, a politics reporter for WABE News and a business reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
