Flights are now resuming after a nationwide ground stop.
The airlines attributing the halt to a technical issue.
And it came at one of the worst possible times.
ABC News transportation reporter Sam Sweeney has the latest on
that.
Sam, I know the ground stop was lifted in just
the last hour, but Christmas Eve is one of the
busiest travel days of the year.
So how are things looking now?
This morning was a mess, Diane.
Just before 7:00 this morning, American Airlines contacting the FAA
telling them they needed a nationwide ground stop across the
country, all flights halted.
What we know right now is that this was some
sort of a computer, a technical issue.
Before a plane leaves the gate, there is a packet
of paperwork that is handed to the pilot and it
has all the performance information, meaning fuel weight and balance
passengers, any alerts that pilots need to know about before
they leave.
And they were unable to get that data to those
aircraft.
And until they had it fixed, they had to haul
all of their flights across the country.
The good news is this only lasted about an hour.
So no cancellations as of yet.
But there will be a ripple effect of delays.
The good news is when it's an entire airline across
the entire country, it's better for those connecting passengers because
all flights are delayed.
So they will just run about an hour behind for
much of the day.
And all of those passengers are, I should say, most
of those passengers will make it to their holiday destination
before Christmas.
Sam, what are the airline officials saying about how this
happened and the larger impact?
Yeah, it's unclear right now how this computer issue happened.
They're working to figure it out.
Of course, they want to figure out how it happened,
why it happened and then prevent it from happening again.
But again, they were able to get this corrected within
the hour.
They contacted the FAA saying we're ready to go.
But as you can see long lines there in Chicago,
one of Americans busiest hubs, Dallas, Charlotte, Philadelphia, all seeing
issue choose as well.
But they are again, those flights are are boarding, they're
getting back into the air and hopefully they can correct
this before the afternoon.
All right, Sam Sweeney, thank you.