American Airlines All Flights Grounded By Computer Glitch
American Airlines flights were grounded across the United States today until 5 pm EDT. American Eagle regional affiliate flights to Dallas, Chicago, and New York’s LaGuardia Airport were also delayed.
Coming a day after the terror bombings at the Boston Marathon, the grounding can’t help but bring back bad memories of the 9/11 terror attacks when flights were grounded for several days. However, the airline said that today’s problem are a technical glitch.
A total of 520 flights had been canceled as of 3:15 PM EDT, and it isn’t currently possible for American Airlines to rebook the travel until the computer system is back online.
AA initially blamed the problem on issues with the Sabre reservation system but then backed off on that claim.
The problem was building all day. A poster on Flyertalk, a site for frequent flyers, said that,”Here at LAX, their system crashed at 8:45 so agents cannot check passengers in and all flights are on hold for departure.” LAX is Los Angeles International, and reportedly it has been a chaotic scene there for much of the day.
Eventually, the glitch spread to American Airlines desks across the nation. There is no real guarantee that the system will be back up at 5 pm, and customers who have flexible travel plans would be wise to take advantage of AA’s offer to change their travel dates free of the normal change fee.
UPDATE: We’re currently unable to modify today’s reservations. However, when able, we’ll offer refunds or update travel at no charge.
— American Airlines (@AmericanAir) April 16, 2013
UPDATE: We are now in a system-wide ground delay until 4:00pm CT as we work to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience.
— American Airlines (@AmericanAir) April 16, 2013
Clarification: The issue is w/ our ability to access our res system & not w/ @sabrenews. We apologize to Sabre & customers for confusion.
— American Airlines (@AmericanAir) April 16, 2013
[American Airlines photo by Andrei Dimofte via Wikipedia Commons]
