American Airlines says it has "stabilised" a computer system that failed at one of its affiliate carriers, causing the cancellation of 2,500 flights over the past week. The failure occurred in computers used to schedule crews for PSA Airlines, which is owned by American and operates many American Eagle regional flights. "It's a hardware issue that was causing some of our applications to run really slowly," an American Airlines spokeswoman said Tuesday. She said employees tried to work around the problem, "but the application was running so slow they just couldn't keep up." FlightStats said PSA canceled more than 500 flights by Tuesday afternoon. All of the airline's morning flights were scrubbed and PSA restarted after the computer system was stabilised. Some cancellations were set for Wednesday as the airline repositioned planes and crews — FlightStats showed about a dozen. Many of the cancellations and longest lines since the outages began last Thursday have been at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, a major hub for American. The incident highlights the role that so-called regional airlines like PSA play in the operations of the giant carriers: American, Delta and United.<br/>
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Nearly five years after closing its merger with US Airways, American Airlines plans to trim its corporate bureaucracy. In a message Tuesday to employees, American CEO Doug Parker and President Robert Isom said the company has more executives than required since it has completed most of the difficult work of integrating the two airlines. They said most cuts will come through job elimination and attrition, but noted some executives may lose their jobs. They also said executives who have been with American at least two years and leave voluntarily will be eligible for severance. “Our current organisational structure resulted largely from integration work that followed our merger and, as all companies do from time to time, we need to evaluate our current organisation with a goal to operate more productively,” Parker and Isom said. “This work starts at the top.” An American spokesman declined to say how many jobs will disappear. But as part of this effort, the airline is not expected to reduce the number of front-line workers who interact with customers. Most of the new cuts will focus on employees holding the title of director or above.<br/>
Thousands of passengers have been told that bookings they made on BA will not be honoured. On 11 and 12 June BA flights to Tel Aviv and Dubai were put on sale through online travel agents at extremely low fares: around GBP200 return to Tel Aviv, and typically GBP220 return to Dubai. Similar fares were offered with “add-on” domestic flights from other UK airports. Frequent flyers quickly identified these as “mistake fares”, filed in error by the airline. The Independent understands that passengers who had booked to fly imminently were allowed to travel on the mistakenly issued tickets. But those with longer horizons have been told that their bookings have been cancelled. BA is issuing refunds, though since these have to be made through the online agent, they may take weeks to materialise. A spokesperson for BA said: “We’ve contacted the small number of travel agents who were able to access the incorrect fare for the short period it was available to advise them and apologise. We are fully refunding the tickets that were booked.”<br/>