New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport was back to normal today after a glitch was fixed in American Airlines' baggage-sorting conveyor belt that caused at least 25 flight delays, an airline spokesman said.
Initially, American's parent company, AMR Corp., said the malfunction yesterday was in software that controlled the baggage-sorting conveyor belt in American's bag room at JFK.
However, airline spokesman Tim Wagner said today that the glitch was caused by a hardware issue involving the network between the computer software that controls the sorting function and the baggage conveyor belts. Wagner said the software was working, the conveyors were working, but some of the network hardware was failing.
The problem was resolved before the first flights took off this morning, he said.
American's baggage handlers had to manually sort passengers' bags yesterday, and many bags didn't make it on board before flights took off. American informed passengers so they could decide whether to board their flights. If they decided to keep their travel arrangements, the airline said their bags would be delivered to their destinations as soon as possible.
"We have the remaining bags from last night, several hundred I'm told, in cargo containers and ready to be put on the flights to their destinations. We should have those out today," he said. "Everything else is back to normal at JFK today."