A sudden power failure that shut down Atlanta’s busy airport Sunday reverberated nationwide, Denver included, with airlines canceling at least a dozen flights in and out of Denver International Airport.
And three more Sunday flights to DIA from Atlanta were listed as delayed Sunday evening, DIA spokesman Heath Montgomery said. Two more DIA-to-Atlanta departures were marked delayed.
“We have a very interconnected national airspace system in this country. When one major hub has problems, it trickles through the rest of the system in many ways,” Montgomery said.
“The airlines build their schedules for their assets which are highly moveable. But if you have a major kink in the hose, it can cause problems for either that airline or others. Something as simple as a computer glitch can cause delays,” he said
The power failure at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in the early afternoon left passengers in the dark. All outgoing flights were canceled, and inbound planes were halted at departure runways. Airlines with hubs in Atlanta, such as Delta, made the most cancellations. Atlanta’s airport serves 275,000 people a day, on average, with about 2,500 planes flying in and out each day.
Georgia Power officials couldn’t say when electricity could be restored. No areas beyond the Atlanta airport were hit by the outage.
