A technical issue temporarily halted more than 900 American Airlines flights in the U.S. early Tuesday morning, marking a challenging start to Christmas Eve travel across the country.
The Federal Aviation Administration reported that American Airlines had requested a ground stop for all its flights. Nearly an hour later, the airline announced that boarding had resumed, and the FAA lifted the ground stop.
“A vendor technology issue briefly affected flights this morning,” American said in a statement sent to ABC News. “That issue has been resolved and flights have resumed.”
“We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning,” the statement added. “It’s all hands on deck as our team is working diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible.”
American Airlines System Outage
The Allied Pilots Association, representing American Airlines’ 16,000 pilots, confirmed that a brief outage in the airline’s Flight Operations System (FOS) on Tuesday morning caused the delays. The FOS is critical for managing operations, including passenger boarding and aircraft departures.
The union noted that American Airlines has backup flight planning tools to minimize disruptions during such outages. Additionally, pilots and crew are trained to handle system failures, ensuring the airline can continue operations without prolonged interruptions.
Outage Disrupts Christmas Schedule
The outage occurred on a day when American Airlines had over 3,300 domestic flights scheduled, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. Despite the disruption, the airline resumed operations without significant cancellations. However, only 37% of flights departed on time, and 36% arrived on schedule.
Still, Cirium reported that 93% of the flights managed to take off within two hours of their planned departure time, minimizing broader impacts on the busy travel day.
The Transportation Security Administration anticipates screening nearly 40 million travelers between December 19 and January 2, marking a 6.2% rise compared to 2023.
American Airlines projected December 27 as its busiest day of the holiday season, with December 20 ranking second. The airline’s holiday travel period began on December 18.
