The weekend is finally here. I’m spending it recovering from a busy week with both our Skift Aviation Forum and Commerce Summit in New York City. We heard from executives at American Airlines, JetBlue, Allegiant, IAG, and Turkish Airlines. Check out some of the highlights here. The FAA also put in place a nationwide ground stop Friday afternoon, which lasted for more than four hours. Disruptions

Nationwide ground stops are extremely rare — this was the third one in 25 years. The first ground stop issued was on 9/11 following the terror attacks and then in January 2023, when a pilot alerting system was experiencing issues.

It is not fully clear yet what caused the outage. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said “nothing was completely certain” when asked whether the Trump administration could say with 100% certainty that the ground stop was not caused by a cyberattack or a rogue AI agent.

“We’re still looking, so we’re not going to rule that out,” Mullin said. But he added that so far, there was “zero evidence that this was a cyber attack or an SI attack.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed old air traffic control equipment for the outage.

“Our switchers and routers got overloaded with data,” Duffy said. “They started to show us inconsistency in the data from these routers, and because of that, the system shut down.”

I also published my latest feature on American Airlines and its efforts to close its gap with rivals Delta and United 

The carrier has been  rolling out no fewer than 50 different changes across customer experience, network, loyalty, premium products, and operations, according to my review of the carrier’s earnings calls and press releases between 2024 and 2026. These changes range from bringing back seatback screens to domestic narrowbodies to fixing the bank structure at its Dallas-Fort Worth hub. 

The most tangible changes can be seen in American’s customer experience. The carrier promoted Heather Garboden into a new chief customer officer role in 2025. She told me in an interview that American has been paying extra attention to customer satisfaction scores and net promoter scores. 

There are early signs that these efforts could be paying off. 

“We’ve improved versus last year in every single one, and so I think that is a great indicator that what we’re doing is heading in the right direction," Garboden said on customer satisfaction. 

Frontline employees are still skeptical. Pilots and flight attendants have sharply criticized American’s leadership this year because of the carrier’s sluggish profitability. Profit sharing has also been a longtime frustration for frontline employees — they only received a few hundred dollars in profit sharing this year. Employees at Delta and United, on the other hand, received thousands. 

“There’s a three or $4 billion profitability gap between our closest competitor,” Allied Pilots President Nick Silva told me. “Excuse me, are those the things that are really going to close the gap? Are Goldfish and Tate’s cookies going to close the gap? Is expanding and refreshing the lounges going to close the gap?”