On the public relations front, Delta's timing couldn't be better.
Some analysts think it's a bad move.
Seventy-five percent of flights take off and arrive on time. Using that information, workers can serve passengers faster and with a far more personal touch. What makes the project so unusual is the extremely tight time frames for completion and the universal access the project provides to mountains of useful passenger and flight data buried deep in multiple mainframe-based systems. But they haven't figured out how to utilize that database. Now, agents using Delta's new gate and boarding application can glance at a single screen on a Windows NT workstation and see which passengers have checked in for a flight.