NEW YORK — Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said that through the first two days of the Delta outage the airline cancelled on the mainline close to five times the number of flights that it has cancelled year-to-date.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Bastian said the airline is determined to woo customers back to the fold. “In the long run, our customers are going to look at who we are and what we provide. … Clearly, we have disappointed customers.

And I’m sure there are customers that decided in the short-term to book away from us. I don’t know the numbers. But we are determined to win those customers back.”

Asked if there had been any short-term impact on bookings, Bastian said “it’s not clear. I think the period of time is really too short to determine that.”

Bastian added that Delta is “going to do everything we can to make certain [this] does not ever happen again. We made a significant investment in our technology infrastructure over the last several years. Candidly, in addition to the disruption this has caused to our people and our customers, that to me is the thing I am most disappointed about.

We’re going to spend this year over US$150 million in technology infrastructure and upgrades alone. We have to analyze how this could happen given the size of the investment we’re making.”

Bastian ended the interview saying “my message is that we’re sorry that this happened and we are known to be a high-quality, highly reliable airline with great people. The technology outage was an incident. It’s not who we are.”