A “vendor technology issue” grounded most American Airlines flights on Christmas Eve.
Customers started complaining on social media early Tuesday morning that some American Airlines flights were returning to their gates. Some were delayed for 90 minutes.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that the airline had requested that its flights get grounded on Christmas Eve. But after an hour, the “vendor technology issue” was resolved and the airline started boarding. The FAA then lifted the national ground stop on American Airlines flights.
In a statement, the airline said, “A vendor technology issue briefly affected flights this morning.” “That issue has been resolved and flights have resumed,” the statement continued. The airline apologized to its customers. In a statement, the airline said “It’s all hands on deck as our team is working diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible.”
System Outage
The Allied Pilots Association, representing 16,000 American Airlines pilots, said that the airline’s flight operation system briefly went down on Tuesday morning. Known as the FOS, the system handles the operations of the airline, including boarding passengers. The union said that the airline had backup flight planning tools in this kind of situation.
However, the airline didn’t confirm which system had an outage, but admitted that the problem prevented them from releasing flights from the gate.
3,300 Domestic Flights
The “vendor technology issue” happened during one of the busiest times of the year. The airline had 3,300 domestic flights scheduled according to aviation analytics company Cirium. The good news is that American Airlines resumed its operations without a significant number of cancellations. Airline spokesperson Sarah Jantz said “Expect some delays throughout the day but (we’re) working to mitigate those and avoid cancels.”
Because of the technical problem, only 37% of American Airlines flights took off on time and only 36% arrived on schedule.