DALLAS — American Airlines resumed most flights Wednesday, a day after a technology failure forced the nation's third-largest carrier to ground all planes from coast to coast.
Some lingering problems remained. At midday, American and regional offshoot American Eagle had canceled more than 200 flights, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.com. But that was a huge improvement over Tuesday, when American and Eagle cancelled nearly 1,000 flights and delayed another 1,100.
"Our operations returned to normal this morning," American Airlines spokesman Andrea Huguely said.
Some of Wednesday's cancellations were because of bad weather in Chicago and a lack of crews and planes in the right places. The airline added five unscheduled flights to accommodate passengers stranded in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles, Huguely said.
The company blamed the breakdown on a "software issue" that knocked out both primary and backup computer reservation systems, which are also used for everything from issuing boarding passes to determining how much fuel to pump into planes.
The failure affected nearly two-thirds of scheduled flights aboard American and American Eagle.