American Airlines resumes flights after brief grounding ahead of busy Christmas travel

By Utkarsh Shetti, Abhijith Ganapavaram and David Shepardson

(Reuters) -American Airlines said on Tuesday its flights had resumed after a technical glitch forced the carrier to issue an hour-long ground stop, disrupting travel for thousands on Christmas Eve, one of the busiest periods of the year.

The issue that briefly affected the carrier’s ability to get its planes in the air involved network hardware and was caused by DXC Technology, an operating system vendor responsible for maintaining its flight operations, the airline said.

While customers were still pressing for details on their delayed flights, the relatively brief stoppage means American will likely avoid a full-scale meltdown that could ripple for days during the peak holiday travel season.

The airline has 3,901 flights scheduled worldwide on Tuesday, with 19 of those canceled, according to data from aviation analytics firm Cirium.

However, only 37% of the flights have departed on time so far in the day, while 36% have arrived on time, according to Cirium.

“Not a good start to Christmas Eve travel as current flight is grounded and Captain cannot provide ETA on resolution from system outage and/or paperwork error at national level. Will make connections or refunds more complicated too,” a user had said, tagging American Airlines on X.

Tuesday’s snafu is the latest technical snag after carriers were hit by a global tech outage tied to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and a software issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike earlier this year.

The outage had cost Delta Air Lines at least $500 million.

Two years ago, Southwest Airlines experienced a meltdown with its systems during the holidays that led to 16,900 flight cancellations and stranded 2 million passengers. It was eventually fined $140 million in the largest-ever civil penalty for a travel disruption.

Airlines have upgraded their cybersecurity and operational software systems, but given that there was an exodus of talented workers during the pandemic, the glitches over the last few years are not altogether unexpected, said Ken Quinn, partner at law firm Clyde & Co.

American Airlines operates thousands of flights per day to more than 350 destinations in over 60 countries.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in a statement on Tuesday referred Reuters to the airline, reiterating that the carrier had reported a technical issue.

The issue with American was reportedly the inability of an automated system to calculate or deliver weight and balance (passenger/baggage/cargo mass and overall center of gravity) data required to legally dispatch each flight, said Robert Mann, a former airline executive who now runs a consulting firm.

The management system may have been unable to load and compute engine power requirements and takeoff performance, he said.

One of American’s hubs, Dallas-Fort Worth, was also experiencing arrival and departure delays, which the airline attributed to adverse weather conditions.

The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen a record 40 million passengers over the holidays.

(Reporting by Utkarsh Shetti and Abhijith Ganapavaram in Bengaluru, additional reporting by Shivansh Tiwary; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar, Sriraj Kalluvila and Shinjini Ganguli)