JetBlue Had a Far Less-Busy Morning Than Usual

JetBlue's flight schedule hit a snag overnight when the airline asked federal officials to temporarily freeze all of its departures across the country. The Federal Aviation Administration said it issued a nationwide ground stop for the carrier just before 1am ET on Tuesday, halting takeoffs for more than an hour, reports the New York Times. Flight-tracking site FlightAware showed roughly 20 JetBlue planes already in the air at the time, implying most of the fleet was still parked ahead of the morning rush. The FAA lifted the restriction around 2:10am. "A brief system outage has been resolved and we have resumed operations," JetBlue said in a statement, without elaborating, per the AP.

Reuters notes that ground stops are typically initiated due to weather or for safety or operational reasons. Early last year, the Transportation Department fined JetBlue $2 million for repeatedly operating chronically late East Coast routes, the first time that regulators had penalized an airline specifically for persistent delays, per the Times. Federal data show that about 71% of JetBlue flights arrived on time in the first nine months of last year, placing the airline near the bottom of the largest US carriers.