FAA: All US United Continental flights grounded – WRDW News 12

Some flights were able to get out of Tampa global Airport on Wednesday before the issues kicked in, said airport spokeswoman Emily Nipps. FlightAware said some 250 flights operated by United’s regional partners were delayed.

“We experienced a network connectivity issue this morning”, United spokesman Luke Punzenberger said by e-mail.

“We’re recovering from a network connectivity issue & restoring flight (operations)”, United said via Twitter.

A Wednesday morning advisory from the Federal Aviation Administration grounded United Airlines flights at all airports across the country for about an hour because of a computer system malfunction.

United Continental has grounded all flights worldwide due to a cyber glitch.

Details of the computer problem were not immediately available.

“Automation issues” triggered the airline to ground the planes for about an hour, the FAA said.

United never shared specifics about the cause, though the FAA labeled it as an “automation issue” – the same language used in Wednesday’s outage.

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered United to ground the flights beginning at 8:26 a.m. EST (GMT1226) and flights did not take off until nearly 10:00 a.m. (GMT1400). If passengers did not have a hard-copy of their boarding pass, one Connecticut airport would not let them check in.

In early June, United briefly halted all takeoffs because of a problem in its flight-dispatching system. Some shorter distance flights were still listed as being on time. United says flights in the air were not directly affected. A number of high-paying business travelers defected to other airlines and revenue dropped.

This is the second time in as many months United has encountered this type of problem.