The epilogue

Having lost nearly as much as Comair made in profit the previous quarter with this fiasco, Delta finally intervened. On Jan. 17 of this year, 20-year Comair veteran and President Randy Rademacher stepped down, and Delta assigned Fred Buttrell, CEO of Delta Connection (which manages Delta’s network of regional carriers) to take over. Shortly after Rademacher’s resignation, Stuart was also asked to leave. Some say more Delta blood may be infused into this regional subsidiary.

But whether Delta will invest more in Comair’s IT remains to be seen. In its 2004 annual report, Delta said that it will post another substantial loss in 2005. A bankruptcy filing remains a possibility. And, says Childress, "when the airlines are in trouble, it’s a lot harder to find cash for IT renewal and replacement." In fact, Delta has not ruled out the possibility of selling Comair or the other regional airline it owns to raise cash.

In the meantime, Bardes says he meets up with some of his old Comair coworkers for lunch every now and then. "I’ll say, Are you still keeping your head down? They’ll say, Oh yeah," Bardes says. "That place just seems to punish people who want to be agents of change."

As of March, Comair was still using the nearly 20-year-old crew management system from SBS, though with a lot more care. SBS implemented a bridge solution, dividing the legacy system into two modules—one for pilot schedule and another for flight attendant schedules—each with a 32,000 monthly limit of its own. Comair also began generating a daily report to monitor the volume of transactions going through the system.

And plans are still in the works to replace it.