Airlines across the U.S. have experienced multiple problems since the start of the pandemic, whether it’s a drop in people traveling, increased disturbances from passengers, lack of staff, or software issues.
Over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, Sun Country ran into several of those issues at one time, leading to cancelled flights, stranded passengers and refunds being issued by the locally-based airline.
Related
The CEO of Sun Country Airlines Jude Bricker says he has never seen such a ‘perfect storm’ of challenges.
“I've never in my career experienced the challenges that we had over the Christmas break,” Bricker told WCCO’s Vineeta Sawker. “So we have these really high volumes associated with holiday travel combined with really challenging weather conditions. Those two things in and of themselves are things we handle usually pretty well. And then on top of that we got an IT outage.”
That IT outage cause havoc for the airline behind the scenes along with dealing with sick employees says Bricker.
“Civic rates for our crews and our key personnel that are required for every flight were up ten times what we usually see as COVID kind of moved through our workforce,” Bricker said. “It's just been a really, really challenging situation.”
Bricker adds that things seem to be back to normal for the airline.
“Yesterday everything was on time and we haven't canceled a flight in about two weeks.”
The IT outage experienced by Sun Country turned out to be a ransomware attack according to Bricker. He says there are no guarantees it won’t happen again, but they’re trying to make their system more secure.
“We take all precautions to try to make sure that our systems are secure and backed up,” Bricker told WCCO. “What happened here is we had an outage and then we went to the fail over solution and that failed as well. And then we have a manual backup process and we just couldn't keep up with the volumes. So we're trying to make it more and more secure as we go. We have about three or four critical systems that we're focused on right now and we'll keep making it more reliable as we keep growing the airline.”
Another major airline story this week focuses on the rollout of 5G cellular service by the major cellphone provides, something airlines are saying could adversely affect airports. President Joe Biden stepped in on Tuesday to ask Verizon and AT&T to delay the rollout around airports.
Related
Bricker tells WCCO it will not affect passenger safety, but they are concerned about it affecting airplane instrumentation.
“Passengers need to know it's not going be a safety issue,” says Bricker. “It may disrupt some flight schedules because when we fly into low visibility conditions, we sometimes rely on instruments that may be affected. I think the concern for us right now is just getting some clarity on the rules and making sure that we don't affect passengers. But it's not a safety issue. I mean, we will fly in some way that we can be confident in the safety that we're delivering to our passengers.”
