American Airlines resumed service Tuesday morning after a brief outage grounded all US flights, citing a “vendor technology issue”. The airline had started boarding flights again at around 8 am ET, and operations have since normalized, although with substantial delays.
The Allied Pilots Association attributed the outage to American’s Flight Operations System (FOS) briefly going down, which affected passenger boarding and airplane release for departure. The union said pilots are trained to navigate system outages.
According to Cirium, 37% of American’s flights took off on time Tuesday, while 36% arrived on schedule. However, 93% of flights took off within 2 hours of their scheduled departure time.
Only 26 flights were canceled nationwide, and over 1,000 flights were delayed globally. Airport congestion and winter weather in the Northeast may have contributed to some delays.
Customers expressed frustration but acknowledged safety as priority. American Airlines said it is working diligently to get customers where they need to go quickly and minimally disrupted. The airline has reduced its schedule for Tuesday and deployed sufficient staffing to support a quick recovery.
A recent technical outage caused travel chaos globally in July, while another winter storm last December led to widespread cancellations due to Southwest Airlines’ outdated technology.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/24/business/american-airlines-delays-cancellations/index.html