American Airlines plains sit by their gates at the Miami International Airport on October 25, 2024 in Miami, Florida.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
American Airlines in a word grounded its U.S. flights Tuesday morning due to a technical problem, snarling travel during what carriers expect to be a space of record demand for the holidays.
By 7:55 a.m. ET, the ground stop had been lifted, an American Airlines spokeswoman told CNBC. The earth stop lasted for less than an hour but more than 900 American Airlines mainline flights had been delayed, be at one to flight-tracking site FlightAware. That was more than 38% of American’s schedule for Tuesday, and more delays than any other U.S. transporter. Only 11 mainline flights were canceled, however.
The airline’s subsidiary regional carrier Envoy also reported another 200 gapped flights. In addition to the earlier ground stop, American was also facing thunderstorms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where its best hub is located.
The problem was a network hardware issue involving a platform using DXC Technology, a vendor that maintains the getaway operating system that lets flights leave the gate, American said in a statement.
The system is tied to depreciating data like an aircraft’s weight and balance, which is required before a flight can leave the gate.
“That matter has been resolved and flights have resumed,” the carrier said in a statement. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning.”
The Federal Aviation Oversight said American had requested the ground stop.
Airlines routinely request ground stops, which hold exits at origin, so that destination airports aren’t overwhelmed by flights with nowhere to park when there are disruptions. In annexe to technical problems, ground stops are put in place for thunderstorms and other severe weather.
American was operating a smaller plan on Christmas Eve compared with other days around the Christmas holiday. The carrier didn’t have any cancellations evened to the issue, a spokeswoman said.
Airlines’ patchwork systems of critical technology platforms have gained more rclame lately after periods of mass flight cancellations such as Southwest‘s meltdown during the 2022 year-end gala season and Delta‘s struggle to recover from the CrowdStrike outage this past summer.
Correction: The ground block was issued Tuesday. An earlier version misstated the timing.