Then came 9/11, crippling airlines big and small, and pushing some of the largest carriers into bankruptcy. Though Delta has thus far avoided that fate, the airline lost nearly $8.5 billion over the following four years, increasing the pressure to keep costs down. While there’s no evidence that Delta refused to fund an upgrade for the crew scheduling system, "approval for capital expenditures seldom went through the first time [at Delta]," Bardes says. "They’d want more analysis. They had a definite influence on how fast money got spent."

Delta declined to comment for this story and referred questions to Comair. Comair spokesman Nick Miller would say only, "We’ve been very straightforward in acknowledging the challenging time we’ve been facing in the airline industry and that we’ve had to be very prudent in how we’ve invested in technology."

Late in 2002, the Comair IT group did turn its attention back to the crew management system and brought in several vendors, including Sabre and SBS, to perform demos. Comair went down the road a bit with one vendor, which it refuses to name, but ultimately backed out during contract negotiations due to pricing concerns. All in all, there seemed to be no hurry on either Comair or Delta’s part to get the project rolling, even though the crew scheduling system was (and still is) the oldest application of its kind still running at a regional carrier, according to a recent survey by Regional Aviation News.

Finally, Comair got approval from Delta to replace the legacy SBS system and inked a deal with Sabre in June 2004 to implement its AirCrews Operations Manager. Implementation was set to begin in 2005. But by then, it would be too late.

On Dec. 16, Comair reported an operating profit of $25.7 million in the third quarter of 2004. A week later, a severe winter storm hit the Ohio Valley. The snow came with sleet and freezing rain. Deicing the jets took much longer than expected and some jets’ tires froze to the ground. From Dec. 22 through the 24th, Comair had to cancel or delay 91 percent of its flights.

And another problem was looming. As it turned out, the crew management application, unbeknownst to anyone at Comair, could process only a set number of changes—32,000 per month—before shutting down. And that’s exactly what happened. On Christmas Eve, all the rescheduling necessitated by the bad weather forced the system to crash. As a result, Comair had to cancel all 1,100 of its flights on Christmas Day, stranding tens of thousands of passengers heading home for the holidays. It had to cancel nearly 90 percent of its flights on Dec. 26, stranding more.