ALASKA AIRLINES FLIGHTS RESUME AFTER BRIEF NATIONWIDE HALT

(Bloomberg) -- Alaska Airlines began resuming normal flight operations after a technology issue led to a temporary grounding of its aircraft nationwide.

The carrier requested that federal regulators halt operations early Wednesday after experiencing an “issue while performing an upgrade to the system that calculates our weight and balance,” it said in a statement. The grounding, which affected all mainline operations and those of its Horizon subsidiary, lasted for about an hour.

Accurate weight and balance calculations are a crucial element in safe flight operations and must be established before aircraft depart.

Alaska said it mitigated the issue but expects “residual delays” to last throughout the day. The US Federal Aviation Administration, which issued a notice of the ground stop online, confirmed that operations had returned to normal.

Shares of the carrier’s parent, Alaska Air Group Inc., rose 3% as of 11:54 a.m. in New York.

The disruption, coming about three months after a mid-flight safety problem with a Boeing Co. plane upended Alaska’s operations, recalls a similar ground stop issued in September for United Airlines Holdings Inc. flights after a software update caused a “widespread slowdown” in the carrier’s technology systems. In early 2023, an FAA system outage forced a nationwide grounding of aircraft.

--With assistance from Ryan Beene and Mary Schlangenstein.

(Updates to include latest information on operations resuming.)