American Airlines AA1989 Returns to Los Angeles With a Possible Landing Gear Issue on Its A321

American Airlines flight AA1989, an Airbus A321 bound for Phoenix, returned to Los Angeles International Airport on the morning of Thursday, November 12, 2026, after its crew reported a possible landing gear issue. The FAA said the jet landed safely back at LAX around 6:50 a.m. local time and that it will investigate.

The aircraft was the A321-231 registered N534UW, according to The Aviation Herald and Flightradar24‘s history for the flight. American Airlines had not published a statement on the return at the time of writing.

A short loop over the Pacific

FlightAware‘s track shows AA1989 taking off from Los Angeles International Airport at 6:14 a.m. PST, westbound over the ocean on its morning run to Phoenix Sky Harbor. About five minutes later the climb stopped at 11,000 feet.

According to the Aviation Herald, the crew halted the climb there and reported a problem with the landing gear. The track then shows the jet holding level for roughly 13 minutes in a loop south of the Palos Verdes Peninsula before it began to descend.

The A321 touched down at 6:50 a.m., about 36 minutes after takeoff, which matches the time in the FAA’s statement. The Aviation Herald says it departed runway 25R and landed on runway 25L.

Neither the FAA nor the Aviation Herald says how many people were aboard or describes any injuries. The FAA’s wording, a “possible gear issue”, also leaves open whether the problem was with the gear itself or with what the cockpit was telling the pilots about it.

Passengers reached Phoenix about 3.5 hours late

American put the flight on a second A321, N189UW, according to the Aviation Herald and Flightradar24. Flightradar24’s records show the replacement leaving Los Angeles at 10:11 a.m. PST and landing in Phoenix at 12:06 p.m. local time.

AA1989 was scheduled to arrive at 8:32 a.m., so passengers got in about three and a half hours late. The Aviation Herald gave the same figure.

N534UW itself stayed on the ground. The Aviation Herald reported it was still at Los Angeles about 26 hours after landing, and Flightradar24 showed no flight for it since the return as of Friday morning, November 13.

FAA registry records list N534UW as a 2009-built A321-231 with IAE V2533-A5 engines, with a registration certificate issued to American Airlines in December 2015. It is an older A321ceo, not the newer A321neo that American flew on flight AA675, which returned to Phoenix after a brake issue earlier this month.

What a gear problem on climb-out involves

The FAA’s maintenance handbook explains that landing gear position indicators show the pilots where each leg is: three green lights mean the gear is down and locked, and many types show a disagree warning when a gear is not where the selector says it should be.

On the Airbus A321 and its A320-family siblings, the system also watches the gear doors. A 2016 FAA airworthiness directive describes cockpit ECAM warnings triggered when the main gear doors opened or closed too slowly during retraction or extension.

A crew that sees a gear fault right after takeoff has a choice to make before it climbs on. Stopping at a moderate altitude near the departure airport, as AA1989 did, keeps the runway it just left a few minutes away while the pilots run the checklist.

The type also has a backup. The same directive, which covers the A318, A319, A320 and A321, describes an alternate, free-fall extension system, in which gravity opens the main gear doors and lets the gear drop into place if the normal extension does not work.

That directive also put a procedure into the flight manual for one warning, “L/G GEAR NOT DOWNLOCKED”: recycle the gear, and if that has not worked after two minutes, extend it by gravity. It shows how the type’s checklists treat a gear that will not lock, though nothing published says which warning, if any, the AA1989 crew saw.

Earlier this week, on Monday, American flight AA206 to Milan came back to Miami with a gear disagree on its 787-8 and landed safely about 30 minutes after takeoff.

For AA1989, the FAA has said only that it will investigate. What maintenance found on N534UW in Los Angeles had not been made public at the time of writing.