Several major airlines ground planes across U.S. because of software problem

Several major airlines across the country grounded their planes Monday morning because of an outage with a software system.

Greg Martin, a spokesman for the FAA, said the problem was with a system called Aerodata that's produced by a vendor to track weight and balance of a plane. It's used in flight planning.

Martin said the impact was "minimal" in terms of the number of planes. It affected several airlines, including Southwest, Delta, Jet Blue, according to airline officials.

"It was out earlier this morning and it should be back very quickly," Martin said of the Aerodata system.

Southwest said it had an "internal ground stop" for about 40 minutes and that "scattered flight delays are anticipated." It advised customers to check its web site for updates.

Delta said in a statement that some of its connecting flights were impacted. "No cancellations are expected due to the issue and our teams are working to resolve some resulting delays," the Delta statement said.

Just after 8 a.m., FlightAware.com said about 100 flights were late or cancelled at Baltimore-Washington International, Dulles International, and Reagan National airports.