DALLAS (AP) — American Airlines is promising to run a near-normal operation today, and that would be just fine for the tens of thousands of passengers who were stranded by a mammoth technology meltdown at the nation’s third-biggest airline.
On Tuesday, American and sister airline American Eagle canceled 970 flights and delayed at least 1 068 more by early evening, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.com.
That means American and Eagle canceled or delayed nearly two-thirds of their scheduled flights after they lost access to a computer system that’s used for everything from issuing boarding passes to determining how much fuel to pump into the plane.
Passengers took to social media sites to criticize the airline, which for hours could only apologize and say that it was trying to fix the problem.
The computer outage began snarling operations around midmorning. Eventually the Federal Aviation Administration issued a so-called ground stop for American Airlines jets around the country.
Flights already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations, but planes on the ground from coast to coast could not take off. And travelers could do little to get back in the air until the computer system was restored.
By late afternoon, American resumed international flights and those from its major hub airports. It scrambled during the evening to put planes and crews in position to get off to a good start on Wednesday morning.
“Despite the magnitude of today’s disruption, we are pleased to report that we expect our operation to run normally with only a small number of flight cancellations” on Wednesday, said Andrea Huguely, a spokeswoman for American. She said American would add flights to accommodate stranded passengers.
American blamed the outage on a loss of access to computer networks that are used for flight reservations and many other functions.
