Delayed emails, empty seats: How a digital communication outage may have stranded more Sunwing passengers

More Sunwing passengers may have been stranded in tropical destinations for longer after the airline was unable to fill seats on some rescue flights thanks to a failure in digital communications, interviews and records provided to CTV indicate. News.

Images of passengers on flights returning to Canada show empty seats on some planes, while passengers left behind complained about notifications and emails telling them their flights were leaving hours after they left.

“It was really strange to see such an empty flight,” said passenger Katherine Kennedy, who flew from Cancun to Toronto just before Christmas. Her bus stopped at various tourist centers without picking anyone up.

“We wait for people who never showed up,” he said. “Each person had a row to themselves. The pilot apologized, saying that he had never seen anything like it.

Meanwhile, passenger Garry Forrester waited in the lobby of his resort, scrolling through his emails, desperate for a flight home to replace his canceled Dec. 24 ticket. But when they arrived, he couldn’t believe it.

An email came at 3:51 am, even though the flight was supposed to leave at 2:36 am, an hour and 15 minutes earlier. Another email arrived at 5:35 am, even though the flight was supposed to leave at 3:20, two hours and 15 minutes earlier.

A nearly empty Sunwing aircraft is seen in this undated image. (Supplied)

Forrester doesn’t yet know if those emails pointed to an actual flight, but if they did, he wanted to be on it.

“I was in disbelief,” he told CTV News in an interview. “I missed Christmas, I’m stuck and they keep giving us all this false information.”

The empty seats compounded the problems the airline was experiencing. a wave of canceled flights stranded passengers, and then the already reeling airline was hit by a massive continent-wide storm. Passengers waited at the airport for a chance to board a flight, with photos and videos showing some sleeping on the floor.

On top of that, it uses Toronto’s Terminal 3, where a baggage carousel malfunction meant many bags were separated from passengers, who are still collecting them from a Mississauga warehouse.

CTV News reached out to cybersecurity expert Claudiu Popa, who looked at the notifications to suggest that a system already overloaded by the volume of canceled flights and displaced passengers could have caused an outage to its computer systems.

The timing errors suggest that Sunwing’s computers may have locked onto a clock in the wrong time zone, he said.

Bags of luggage pile up in the bag claim area at Toronto Pearson International Airport as a major winter storm disrupts flights in and out of the airport, in Toronto, Saturday, December 24, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS /Cole Burston

“If I received a notification a few hours late, I would assume that the system took a time from a different network time server,” he said.

CTV News reached out to Sunwing to ask why these notifications were incorrect and how often they may have occurred. The company did not respond to those questions.

In a statement, the company said it had ordered 43 recovery flights, saying: “All scheduled recovery flights are now complete and those still at the destination are rescheduling previously missed return flights, or on longer vacations and are scheduled to return at a later date based on your original date of departure.

“Any other rescheduling changes are not related to the holiday interruptions. We sincerely thank our customers for their patience and understanding as our teams worked tirelessly to restore regular operations,” the company said.

Airlines do not have to give compensation if a flight is canceled due to weather. Proving that the true cause is something else is up to the passenger, and that must change, NDP MP Taylor Bachrach said.

“Right now the burden of proof falls on the passengers, which is ridiculous. Put the burden of proof on the airlines and have them dig into the files and come up with evidence as to why that is out of their control,” Bachrach said.

The digital communication failures compounded a much broader problem facing the company, as it was hit by multiple simultaneous crises, Kennedy said.

“We never received a form of communication,” he said, calling his ability to make that flight with so many empty seats a “fluke.”

“Better communication would have solved a lot of problems for people,” he said.

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