American Airlines said that a glitch with a third-party application used on pilots' iPads caused several flights to be delayed on Tuesday.
The airline said that some planes were forced to return back to flight gates so that pilots could access a WiFi connection and fix the app issues. It was not immediately clear how many flights were affected. The issue was with software containing mapping and flight-planning information, the airline said.
“We apologize for the inconvenience to our customers. We hope to have them on the way to their destination as soon as possible,” the airline said in a statement.
American Airlines has been using iPads in the cockpit since 2013 when the company decided to digitize paper-based reference materials and manuals pilots carried on planes.