American Airlines announced it was canceling as much as 500 flights on Tuesday for more maintenance inspections and more flights are expected to be canceled today. This is the biggest cancellation yet in a series of similar measures taken by some of United States’ biggest air carriers.

Estimations show that the plans of approximately 54,000 travelers were interrupted by the flight cancellations of the world’s largest airline.

Almost 1000 flights were canceled by American Airlines (AA) alone since last week. Its MD-80 fleet was grounded for safety inspections at the wiring bundles. The average age of AA’s 300 MD-80s is 18 years.

The company decided to recheck its planes after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) expressed its concern about the last inspection. AA stated that the current inspection is about rechecking the spacing of the ties on the wiring bundles as well as the direction in which the retention clips and cords were facing.

"It goes without saying that this second grounding is beyond annoying," "It's one thing to ground planes for emergency inspections. . . It's entirely another matter to ground the planes again because the emergency inspections may not have been done properly," said Joe Brancatelli, publisher for Joe Sent Me.

LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark airports will lose 85 flights per day altogether said airline spokesman Ned Raynolds, who added that it’s "anybody's guess" how long the cancellations will take. LaGuardia, the terminal with the most MD-80 traffic, will suffer most of the cancellations.

"We're sure they'll be out of the air tomorrow," he said Tuesday. "After that, it's day by day. But we are doing our very best to get the planes back in the air as soon as possible."

AA canceled 15 flights at the Los Angeles International Airport. Four jets didn’t take off as scheduled on Tuesday at San Diego International Airport; two flights were canceled at John Wayne Airport in Orange County and one each at Burbank and Ontario International Airport.

The series of cancellations over safety inspections was started by Southwest Airlines. The carrier had to ground dozens of 737s to carry out missed structural inspections. After inspectors found fuselage cracks on some aircrafts, the FAA proposed to fine the carrier with $10.2 million (5.1 million pounds).

US Airways Group was next in line and the company grounded six 757s for inspections.
American Airlines also canceled on March 26 nearly 10 percent of its air traffic, the equivalent of approximately 200 flights, to check on wiring bundles in its MD-80 planes.

Then Delta Air Lines then followed. The carrier also canceled flights to carry out inspections at wiring bundles on certain planes. Nearly 430 MD-80s were inspected by both carriers.