JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
It has been a chaotic and frustrating day for many air travelers this Christmas Eve. Hundreds of American Airlines flights were delayed, after the carrier temporarily grounded its entire fleet this morning because of what the airline is calling a technology issue. NPR's Joel Rose reports, it is just the latest airline to deal with a major technological glitch.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: It was a rough morning to be flying on American Airlines.
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UNIDENTIFIED GATE AGENT: To let you know what's going on right now - our system is down. We cannot show the crew on or board any customers.
ROSE: That's a gate agent at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, from a video posted on social media by reporter Anna McAllister, with the CBS station in Miami.
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UNIDENTIFIED GATE AGENT: Just bear with us. We are working on it. Hopefully it won't be long. Thank you.
ROSE: Similar scenes played out at airports across the country, as American grounded all flights for about an hour. Some planes had to return to their gates so that passengers could get off. Hundreds of flights were delayed, particularly at airports in Charlotte, Dallas and other cities where American has hubs. In a statement, American apologized to its customers and blamed the problem on a, quote, "vendor technology issue." It is not the first airline to suffer a software meltdown at a bad time.
ROBERT MANN JR: These are robust systems, but they still break. And so the key is how your people accommodate that.
ROSE: Robert Mann Jr. is an aviation consultant in New York. He says American seemed to get back on track fairly quickly today, hopefully avoiding the kind of multi-day outage that has plagued its competitors like Delta and Southwest. Still, Mann says, the timing, during one of the busiest travel periods of the year, has to hurt.
MANN: You make all your money and you make all your reputation on how you do in peak periods. And it doesn't help when you have a system failure like that, but the key to everything is how you manage it.
ROSE: So why don't airlines invest more in their computer systems? George Hamlin is an aviation consultant in Virginia. He says it comes down to money.
GEORGE HAMLIN: They're businesses. If you spent your entire revenue base on producing the highest-quality software, you'd go broke. You know, there's always a balance between good enough and 100% reliability.
ROSE: American has not said which vendor caused the problem or problems, but some of the airline's pilots told passengers there was an issue with the system that handles weight and balance calculations, which are crucial for safe and legal operations. And no airline wants to compromise on that. Joel Rose, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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