By all accounts, Delta’s attitude toward Comair was, Why mess with success? Even IT looked okay to Delta. On paper, Comair had project time lines, good budgets, everything you’d expect to see. "So there was no mandate at the Delta level to get the Comair IT ship righted," Hegeman says. The only area Delta appeared to be concerned about was marketing; the parent airline replaced the entire marketing department at Comair within days of taking over.

Comair, like most acquired companies, wasn’t exactly welcoming to its new owner either. "There was definite friction," Hegeman says. "Top management at Comair didn’t take kindly to being part of mother Delta." So Comair continued to run independently for the most part—although as a wholly owned subsidiary, all major capital expenditures had to be approved by the parent company, Bardes and others say.

After Dublikar left, the IT director position stayed vacant for a number of months. In early 2000, Mike Stuart, senior vice president of flight operations, was given oversight of IT. And in March 2000, Sherri Kurlas-Schalk, who had been with the company since 1990, was named IT director. The tendency in the IT department, meanwhile, was to "keep your head down" and not draw too much attention to anything, according to Bardes, who left Comair in late 2003 to join software and IT services company Compuware as a senior systems designer. After the uncertainty in IT leadership and the takeover by Delta, there was a palpable lack of commitment to projects in IT. "Everyone was expecting someone else to move projects along," Bardes says. "The business units were expecting IT to push a project through. And IT was waiting for the business unit to push it through."

The five-year plan, which was supposed to be revisited on a regular basis, languished.

In 2001, an 89-day pilot’s strike from March to June shut down Comair and the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, where Delta and Comair operate 90 percent of all flights. Comair closed its Cincinnati concourse, losing more than 800 daily flights and saddling Delta with a $200 million loss for the quarter. Once the strike was over, Comair’s flight operations group, the primary users of the crew scheduling system, had their hands full getting planes back in the air. "You can’t just switch things on and get an airline running again," says Bardes. "There’s a lot of inertia and momentum lost when you shut down, and it’s hard to get started again." During this period, they gave little or no thought to replacing the crew scheduling system.