American Airlines flights across the United States were delayed Tuesday morning due to technical issues, halting travel on one of the busiest days of the year.
The airline has requested a nationwide stopover, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA then lifted ground control after the relatively brief outage. American Airlines said flights resumed at 8:50 a.m. EDT.
“A technology issue with a supplier briefly affected flights this morning. This 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. It’s all hands on deck as our team works diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible.”
The setback affected the systems American needed to release flights, the airline said.
The FAA ordered a ground shutdown of all American Airlines flights in the United States, including those operated by the airline’s subsidiaries, around 6:50 a.m. Tuesday. 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 caused,” the airline said in a statement previously obtained by CBS News.
Minutes before the ground stop, American Airlines acknowledged technical issues were hampering flight plans in a social media post. Reply to a user on who said around 6:30 a.m. that his flight from St. Louis to Miami was blocked, citing a “system-wide outage,” the airline said: “We are currently experiencing a technical issue with all flights from American Airlines Your safety is our top priority, once this issue is resolved, we will get you safely to your destination.
When asked by the traveler to provide an estimated time frame, American said the airline could only reiterate that its team was “trying to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”
The outage came in the middle of a particularly busy holiday season, which could prove to be the busiest on record for American Airlines, the company’s vice president said last week.
This is in line with national travel projections for the end of the year. AAA said more than 119 million people are expected to travel at least 50 miles from their homes between Saturday last weekend and New Year’s Day, which falls on Wednesday next week. If those numbers prove true, they would surpass the previous year-end travel record in 2019, according to the auto club.
Projections specifically for air travel were also quite high. After the House of Representatives narrowly avoided a government shutdown last Friday, the Transportation Security Administration said it was preparing to screen nearly 40 million people at U.S. airports between Dec. 19 and Jan. 2. Airlines for America, a trade group, offered a similar figure. , saying in a separate statement that it expected U.S. airlines to carry 54 million passengers between Dec. 18 and Jan. 6. Both estimates from the TSA and Airlines for America represented an increase of at least 6% over last year’s holiday air travel statistics.
