American Airlines flights across the United States were delayed by technical problems Tuesday morning, disrupting travel on one of the busiest days of the year.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the airline requested a nationwide ground stop. The FAA later lifted the ground stop after a relatively brief outage. American Airlines said flights had resumed by 8:50 a.m. EDT.
“Flights were briefly affected this morning due to a vendor technology issue. The issue has been resolved and flights have resumed,” the airline said in a statement. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience caused this morning. Everything is OK as our team is working diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible.”
The airline said the outage affected systems needed to continue operating US flights.
The FAA ordered the grounding of all American Airlines flights in the US around 6:50 a.m. Tuesday, including flights operated by the airline's subsidiaries. That order was canceled about an hour later, the Air Traffic Control Command Center said in an advisory.
At the time, American reported a “technical issue” affecting its flights Tuesday morning.
“Our teams are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” the airline said in an earlier statement obtained by CBS News.
Minutes before the ground stop, American Airlines acknowledged in a social media post that technical problems were disrupting flight plans. Reply to a user on Who said at about 6:30 a.m. that their flight from St. Louis to Miami was grounded, citing a “system wide outage,” the airline said: “We are currently addressing a technical issue with all American Airlines flights. Your safety is our top priority, once this is sorted we will get you to your destination safely.”
When the passenger asked to provide an estimated time frame, American said the airline could not do so, but reiterated that its team was “trying to fix it in the shortest possible time.”
The outage occurred in the midst of a particularly busy holiday travel season, which may be American Airlines' busiest season on record, The vice president of the company said Last week. Since last Wednesday, about 3.3 million people have traveled on US flights, according to the airline, and another 700,000 were expected to do the same on Sunday.
This is in line with national travel projections for the end of the year. More than 119 million people are expected to travel at least 50 miles from their homes between Saturday of last weekend and New Year's Day, which falls on Wednesday of next week, AAA said. According to the Auto Club, if these figures prove true, they will top the travel records set at the end of last year in 2019.
Estimates for air travel in particular were also quite high. After the US House narrowly avoided a government shutdown last Friday, the Transportation Security Administration said it was preparing to screen about 40 million people at US airports between December 19 and January 2. Airlines for America, a trade group, has also presented similar figures. , said in a separate statement that it estimated U.S. airlines would carry 54 million passengers between Dec. 18 and Jan. 6. Both the TSA and airlines' projections for the U.S. show an increase of at least 6% from last year's holiday air travel figures.
American Airlines said it was performing “quite well” ahead of Christmas Eve as employees worked to meet holiday demands, with another statement saying the airline had seen “our “The travel period began on December 18.”
According to American, none of its mainline flights – not including flights operated by its subsidiaries – were canceled on Sunday, December 22, one of the busiest days of the season. The airline also said it canceled only 136 of the 31,000 scheduled flights from last Wednesday to Sunday, with almost all the cancellations attributed to a round of winter Due to which visibility reduced.