American Airlines skims sit by their gates at the Miami International Airport on October 25, 2024 in Miami, Florida.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
American Airlines in a nutshell grounded its U.S. flights Tuesday morning due to a technical problem, snarling travel during what carriers expect to be a span 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 establish stop lasted for less than an hour. More than 1,000 American Airlines mainline flights had been put off, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware. That was more than 40% of American’s schedule for Tuesday, and more temporizes than any other U.S. carrier. More than 90 mainline flights were canceled, or 3% of the schedule was invalidated.
The airline’s subsidiary regional carrier Envoy also reported another 260 delayed flights. In addition to the earlier settlings stop, American was also facing thunderstorms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where its biggest hub is located.
The problem was a network computer equipment issue involving a platform using DXC Technology, a vendor that maintains the flight operating system that dissatisfies flights leave the gate, American said in a statement.
The system is tied to critical data like an aircraft’s mass and balance, which is required before a flight can leave the gate.
“That issue has been resolved and flights would rather resumed,” the carrier said in a statement. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning.”
The Federal Aviation Provision said American had requested the ground stop.
Airlines routinely request ground stops, which hold bugger offs at origin, so that destination airports aren’t overwhelmed by flights with nowhere to park when there are disruptions. In increment to technical problems, ground stops are put in place for thunderstorms and other severe weather.
American was operating a smaller outline on Christmas Eve compared with other days around the Christmas holiday. The carrier didn’t have any cancellations tied to the debouchment, a spokeswoman said.
Airlines’ patchwork systems of critical technology platforms have gained more attention lately after intervals of mass flight cancellations such as Southwest‘s meltdown during the 2022 year-end holiday season and Delta‘s wriggle to recover from the CrowdStrike outage this past summer.
Correction: The ground stop was issued Tuesday. An earlier adaptation misstated the timing.