New York: The largest airline in the world, American Airlines, suffered a massive technical disruption during the busiest travel time on Christmas Eve, forcing it to stop all flights across the system, which affected countless travelers across the United States.
The airline had to suspend activities for an hour on the ground early Sunday morning due to vendor-related issues. Some passengers voiced their concerns about the aircraft that were better off going back to the terminal but were already on runways, generating a lot of problems during one of the busiest holiday travel seasons.
“Our teams are working diligently to resolve this issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused to our customers,” read the message.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed the American Airlines request for a ground stop was issued, and the ground stop was then lifted after a short period. The incident affected domestic flights across the airline’s network, which normally serves thousands of daily flights to more than 350 places in 60 countries.
People took to social media to express their complaints over the incident, while many of them posted videos about their cancelled flights and delayed travel schedules. The timing of the technical bug was especially unfortunate as it occurred during the holiday travel period, which was likely to be record-breaking in the US.
Also, it reminds me of a similar incident two years before when Southwest Airlines faced the same type of system hack during the holiday season, which made a total of 16,900 flight cancellations and affected nearly 2 million passengers.
Data analysts say that this outage, though shorter in duration, focuses again on the problem of the main carriers becoming technical failures at peak travel times. The airline has now continued normal operation, except that the side effects of the morning’s disruptions still apply to some flights.
“While the system has been restored, we are working to minimise ongoing delays and cancellations,” said an American Airlines representative. “We appreciate that holiday travel means a lot to passengers and are trying our best to provide them with the expected services.”
The incident demonstrates the highly intricate technical system behind air travel that has to bear even a momentary failure of the flexibility of the whole world aviation, particularly in the peak holiday travel period.