DAL Delta Air Lines Inc

Delta Air Lines Inc. said it was nearing recovery Wednesday from three days of travel chaos after an unprecedented computer failure earlier this week forced it to cancel nearly 2,100 flights world-wide and damaged its solid operational reputation.

For Ed Bastian, who took over as Delta's chief executive officer in May after 18 years at the Atlanta-based airline, the experience has been difficult and frustrating.

"In the short term, this was a nick on us," he said in an interview Wednesday. "This has been tough on our people and tough on our customers. It has caused us to ask a lot of questions which, candidly, we don't have a lot of answers for."

Mr. Bastian, 59 years old, said that over the past three years, the No. 2 airline by traffic has spent "hundreds of million in technology infrastructure upgrades and systems," including $150 million this year alone.

"We've identified reliability in our technology suite, and we've made progress to address that," he said. "Progress wasn't visible this week. It's not clear the priorities in our investment have been in the right place."

The company earlier this year named a new chief information officer and has brought in other new leaders for its technology and infrastructure team. "We needed to increase the skill set, and we've done that," Mr. Bastian said. No one has lost their job as a result of the meltdown.

For now, Delta said it is spending more effort on the recovery than it is on troubleshooting exactly what went wrong that lead to the 2:30 a.m. Monday equipment failure, power outage, small fire and failure of all the systems to come back to life in backup mode after power was restored. He stressed that Delta isn't blaming anyone else, including the local power company or other IT vendors.

"This is our responsibility," he said. "We own the issue. The buck stops here."

"We realize we've let our customers down," the CEO said. "We're going to let our actions speak louder than words. We have a lot of customer goodwill. I'm confident once we're back up and running, we will fight hard to regain that trust."

Delta has been offering $200 vouchers good for future travel to customers delayed more than three hours or grounded by cancellations. Mr. Bastian said the company arrived at that number because it was the average cost on one-way tickets Delta had sold for travel on Monday and Tuesday. The company intends to do other things for its premium customers and frequent flier members. In the height of the problem, Delta turned to its fleet of private jets to get some of its highest-level customers to their destinations, he said.

Mr. Bastian said there is "nothing endemic" in the meltdown "to make us believe we're at risk. This is an incident. Nothing we see has carryforward risk" except regaining customer goodwill.

Delta canceled nearly 300 flights Wednesday, after 800 on Tuesday and 1,000 on Monday. But the company is hoping that will be the end of it and is working hard to get its flight crews and planes into the proper position and having the proper rest so they can fly the schedule Wednesday afternoon and into Thursday. But thunderstorms along the East Coast of the U.S. on Wednesday could add to the hiccups.

Write to Susan Carey at susan.carey@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 10, 2016 17:15 ET (21:15 GMT)

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