American Air Flight Delays Mount Amid Maintenance System Problem

(Bloomberg) -- American Airlines Group Inc. flight delays swelled to more than 830 on Wednesday as the carrier sought to repair a technical issue affecting maintenance procedures. 

American didn’t specify the problem that it said workers were “actively troubleshooting,” but individuals posted complaints on X.com about late flights in cities including Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, Tampa, Florida and Austin, Texas. The issue delayed about 28% of American’s mainline flights, according to Flightaware.com, but was not affecting those by its regional airline partners.

The delays occurred hours after another technology issue led United Airlines Holdings Inc. to ask federal officials to briefly ground all of its mainline planes, and less than a week after a major disruption of American flights at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport when cables feeding data to an air traffic control facility were mistakenly cut. 

United said the disruption occurred following routine maintenance, after which the airline’s ability to connect to its technology network briefly failed. Flightaware showed only 80 flights delayed and five canceled, given the ground stop happened outside the busy travel hours. 

A separate software outage at United last month temporarily grounded planes across the US and delayed more than 1,000 flights. That failure involved the airline’s Unimatic system, which contains information for each flight that is distributed to other operating systems, including those that calculate the weight and balance for planes and track flight times. United said that outage and the one earlier today were not related. 

Almost 700 American flights were canceled and hundreds more delayed Sept. 19 and 20 after workers cut fiber optic cables feeding data to a facility overseeing air traffic in an area including both Dallas-Fort Worth International and Dallas Love Field. American estimated more than 100,000 passengers were affected at the time.

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