American Airlines resumes flights after brief shutdown ahead of busy Christmas period

“Not a good start to the Christmas Eve trip as the current flight is grounded and the captain cannot provide an anticipated resolution of the system outage and/or documentation error on a national level. Connections or refunds will also be more complicated,” said one user, marking American Airlines in the X.

The company’s shares fell 0.3% in morning trading.

American operates thousands of flights a day to more than 350 destinations in more than 60 countries.

In a statement, the US Federal Aviation Administration referred Reuters to the airline, reiterating that the company had reported a technical issue.

The problem with American would have been the inability of an automated system to calculate or provide weight and balance data (passenger/baggage/cargo mass and overall center of gravity) needed to legally dispatch each flight, said Robert Mann, a former executive from the airline who now runs a consultancy business.

The management system may not have been able to load and compute engine power requirements and takeoff performance, he said.