12,000 American Airlines flights briefly didn't have pilots scheduled after a glitch allowed them to drop assignments

• Thousands of July American Airlines flights briefly didn't have pilots scheduled, the Allied Pilots Association said.
• A glitch in its trip-trade system had temporarily allowed pilots to drop assignments, the APA said.

Thousands of American Airlines flights set for July briefly didn't have pilots scheduled after a glitch allowed them to drop assignments, its pilots' union said. The glitch has since been resolved and American says that it doesn't expect it to impact travel plans.

On Friday night, American's trip-trade system allowed pilots to opt out of some of their scheduled flights, Ed Sicher, the president of the Allied Pilots Association(APA), said in a statement on Saturday. He put this down to "AA's operational mismanagement."

The union told news outlets including CNBC and The Wall Street Journal that as a result of the glitch, up to 12,075 flights scheduled for July were missing a captain, first officer, or both. The union said that American had reinstated about 80% of the trips, per reports.

"Our pilot trip trading system experienced a technical issue. As a result of this technical glitch, certain trip trading transactions were able to be processed when it shouldn't have been permitted," the airline told Insider.

"We already have restored the vast majority of the affected trips and do not anticipate any operational impact because of this issue."

American didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside of regular working hours.

APA told pilots on Sunday that if the airline added the flights back to their schedules it would violate its contract, but said that it was working with American to find a both short- and long-term fixes, per The Journal.

Sicher added that American CEO Robert Isom had called him four times that day "to commit to mitigating the damage from this debacle," and said that they had discussed paying an "inconvenience premium" to pilots who took on those flights, per The Journal.

American has around 15,000 pilots.

The scheduling issues at American come amid a period of travel chaos. Flights have been canceled, delayed, and changed and passengers have in some cases been left standing in line for security for hours or arriving in their destinations without luggage because of a combination of labor shortages at both airports and airlines, staff strikes, technical problems, and bad weather.

According to flight-tracking site FlightAware, 50% of flights from Toronto, nearly half of all flights from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and Frankfurt International, and 42% of flights from Montreal-Trudeau and London Heathrow were delayed on Sunday.

In the US, 27% of flights from JFK Airport, 23% of flights from Dallas-Fort Worth International, and 22% from Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta were delayed.