American Airlines resumes flights after FAA lifted nationwide groundstop

American Airlines says it has resumed service Tuesday morning following a brief outage that grounded all its flights during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

According to American Airlines, flight delays experienced in the United States were a result of a “vendor technology issue”.

The airline spokesman, Sarah Jantz disclosed that flights began again at around 8 am ET, and flights have since resumed.

The Allied Pilots Association said the delays were due to the Airlines’ Flight Operations System, known as FOS, that briefly went down Tuesday morning.

FOS handles the airline’s operations, including passenger boarding. According to the union, American Airlines has backup flight planning tools to prevent an outage from shutting down the entire airline for extended periods of time, stating that pilots and crew are trained to understand how to navigate a system outage.

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration, in a statement, has lifted its nationwide groundstop order for all American flights. The FAA said American requested a nationwide groundstop but it referred all questions to the airline for more information.

According to CNN, the aviation analytics firm Cirium reveals that the outage experienced by American Airlines came on a day when the airline is scheduled to have more than 3,300 domestic flights. However,  services have resumed with residual delays but without a substantial number of cancellations.

“It’s all hands on deck as our team is working diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible,” American Airlines said. “We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”

According to them, delayed customers should be on their way with minimal disruption.

“Expect some delays throughout the day but [we’re] working to mitigate those and avoid cancels,” Jantz said. “We have a smaller schedule today and have the staffing to support the quick recovery.”

CNN reports that 26 flights across all airlines were cancelled nationwide, according to data tracker FlightAware. More than 1,000 flights into, within and out of the United States were delayed – a number that picked up shortly after the American outage, but it could also be caused by airport congestion and some winter weather in the Northeast.

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