And if their plane maintenance is any indication
This was an ETOPS flight, yeah? Those come with higher standards for crew training, maintenance, and minimum equipment per the FAA. I wouldn't worry until/unless the FAA starts making noise about revoking Delta's ETOPS certification (which would hurt their ability to fly a bunch of routes and their ability to perform maintenance for e.g. Hawaiian).
Such a rules engine is required for day-to-day ops management of a heterogeneous fleet (e.g. "list nearest airplanes to airport X that can fly non-stop for Y nautical miles to airport Z". Or "create flight plans ensuring that each airplane is certified in both departure & arrival countries"). I doubt hard-coding would be required, as such a system is likely flexible
Check out https://youtu.be/7PQTMx7TZ9A, quite a few folks went through some emotional trauma over this one, unfortunately.
by 'hurt' the earlier parent was pretty obviously (at least for me) referring to the chance at an outright failure and crash resulting in injury or loss of life.
not that a bad experience and the resulting psychological trauma doesn't constitute 'hurt'; but it's a kind of hurt that one stands a chance to recover from .
By cancelling the service to Accra, probably.
Misunderstanding the airline industry, or the country, or how airports operate, or what really.
The real world has more shades of grey. Delta can probably put a note in their scheduling system to make sure the airliner in question doesn't go to that country. They also know how much money they lose if they take their ball and go home, and probably wouldn't even be flying the route if it was completely unprofitable. (There are probably partners that rely on the service, and maintaining a good relationship with business partners is important too in a less financially-obvious way.)
Just going based on how long it's run, the prices myself and family have paid for tickets relative to destinations a similar distance away, observed usage of capacity on each flight, and the fact it has literally no competition, they wouldn't up and cancel it short of some sort of safety threat to their staff or business. Definitely not because a problem airliner gets noted.
It seems like it would be a knee-jerk overreaction to be, but Delta obviously has a lot of management issues and a shortsighted knee-jerk decision from them (or most giant corporations) would not surprise me.
And I guess even without the personal context, just common sense tells me that setting up a direct tranatlantic route and then keeping it going for as many years as they have should still communicate the profitability there, and that being told their plane with obvious safety issues isn't welcome isn't why they'd cancel the flight.
I guess to me it's just feels like a very US thing to think this. Like if you picture Ghana as some tiny African country it's obvious: you probably imagine it's just a small line item on Delta's balance sheet, duh big corporation doesn't care about your feels and will take their ball home...
But that's the only direct flight from the US to Ghana, direct flights from the US to West Africa are not common (afaik there's only one to Ghana and one to Nigeria) and they pretty much get to name their prices on the flight and keep demand (and knowing how much it costs me to visit home they very much do take advantage of that).
If the software does not support Anti-Affinity basically it is going to be someone's job to make sure it doesn't get routed to this route and manually override when it does and avoid an Aviation regulatory incident imagine the headache if Ghana refused entry or refused that plane to board passengers if by mistake it land in Accura, and the PR circus around it.
The ROI on the route may not be not simply worth it. On the other hand Delta probably also do not want negative PR around scrapping the route immediately even if they wanted to. Routes rarely get scrapped overnight there are existing commercial agreements, government requirements, regulatory notices, operational change in ground support and so on to be planned and executed, even if they want to do that, it will take sometime to actually do it.
There’s also a human in the loop who should catch scheduling software mistakes; it’s part of the pilot’s job to confirm that all is well before taking off.
Changing Tail numbers are fairly rare in the industry, given the overhead required, the typical reason it happens when for Tax reasons registration is moved to another country ( numbers have a country prefix), but it is possible .
It's reasonable for regulators to assume that people aren't going to intentionally fuck with them, when the incentive to fuck with them is practically non-existent...
While the spirit of a law or regulation is important in evaluating a case[1], even the smallest of technicalities are fought over in lawsuits and can determine the outcome of a dispute like this. There are many examples like the famous case that was determined by the Oxford comma to all the cases that decide what EPA, OSHA, CDC, or SEC can and cannot do decided by technicality or literal interpretation
So it would be kind of important to have that kind of loophole removed.
[1] Texualist proponents and federalist society judges have a strong opinion (when it comes to constitution) that add to my point on that but that is different can of worms I don't want to use as basis of an argument