American Airlines was forced to ground large parts of its fleet on Thursday night, after a computer malfunction led to a widespread outage.
Flights from Chicago O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth and Miami were all halted while the company struggled to deal with the issue.
The issue began around midday local time, and continued until mid-afternoon. The airline didn’t go into any more detail on what caused the malfunction, while the Federal Aviation Authority’s advisory only detailed it as “airline issues”.
During the outage, an American Airlines spokesman told Time Magazine: “We have resolved connectivity issues that led to a ground stop today at our Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth and Miami hubs. We apologise for the inconvenience and are working to get our customers on their way as soon as possible.”
The grounding is just the latest in a long string of US airlines forced to delay or cancel flights due to computer errors. In July, United Airlines was forced to ground thousands of flights across the US after what the airline described as a “network connectivity issue”. In June, United again was forced to ground flights due to “automation issues”.
And in April, American Airlines delayed multiple flights after the iPad app used by pilots crashed. Introduced in 2013, the cockpit iPads are used as an “electronic flight bag”, replacing 16kg (35lb) of paper manuals which pilots are typically required to carry on flights. They distribute information such as flight plans throughout the airline’s fleet, but failed across the airline on 29 April.
