American Airlines briefly grounds flights nationwide during holiday travel surge

American Airlines grounded all flights briefly on Tuesday due to a technical issue with its flight operating system, just as holiday travel surged. The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ground stop about an hour later. The outage caused significant delays, with only 37% of flights departing on time. Out of nearly 3,900 scheduled flights, 19 were canceled, while most delays were resolved within two hours. As winter weather impacted travel, the Transportation Security Administration projected 40 million passengers would be screened through January 2. This holiday season marks the first since a new rule requires airlines to automatically refund customers for canceled or significantly delayed flights.