American Airlines Grounds All US Flights For An Hour On Christmas Eve, What Happened?

Washington: On Christmas Eve, American Airlines grounded all its flights in the United States for around an hour due to an unspecified technical issue. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered the grounding of the airlines’ US flights after the carrier reported a technical issue.

The glitch has hit the entire system with millions traveling for the holiday, reported the Associated Press. “Our team is currently working to rectify this. Your continued patience is appreciated,” the airlines said in social media replies to passengers.

Later, the flights were cleared to fly by federal regulators after an hour of a national ground stop order by the FAA. According to the AP, 1,447 flights were delayed while 28 were cancelled following the order, which severely hit the travel plans of millions of passengers amid the Christmas and New Year holidays.

“We have resolved a vendor technology issue that briefly affected flights this morning. We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and have issued a travel alert to allow for additional flexibility,” it said in an X post.

AP stated that Dallas-Fort Worth witnessed the most delays, followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, Washington, New York, Chicago and Miami.

The incident reminded people of 20222 when Southwest Airlines stranded 2 million travellers in December, and Delta Air Lines was hit by a smaller but significant meltdown following a global outage in July.

The CrowdStrike update led to chaos across the world with the system of airports, airlines, and banks falling like a pack of cards.

What Did FAA Say?

According to a report, the FAA ordered all American Airlines flights grounded in the US at the airline’s request. The airline had reported a technical issue affecting its entire system and in an email said that the problem was caused by a vendor technology issue.

It added that the glitch impacted systems needed to release flights. It happened at a time when millions of passengers were about to fly their home or holiday destinations for Christmas and New Year. The Transportation Security Administration said it expects to screen around 40 million passengers till January 2.

Notably, airlines sees their busiest days on Friday and Sunday, and on December 26, December 27 and December 29.