American Airlines has alleged in a report to the U.S. Transportation Department that its recent grounding of more than 3,300 flights - disrupting travel for roughly 300,000 passengers - could have been avoided if a tentative agreement between the airline and local Federal Aviation Administration officials hadn't been reversed, according to people familiar with the matter. The report, delivered Friday to Transportation secretary Mary Peters, indicates that the airline thought it had a handshake agreement with regional FAA managers intended to put repairs to wiring systems on its MD-80 aircraft on a schedule that would have kept the entire fleet in the air and avoided massive passenger disruptions, WSJ.com reports.

FAA officials, slated to provide their own version of events, are expected to dispute such assertions, according to some of these people. Instead, the agency's chronology is expected to stress poor workmanship in securing and protecting electrical wires, resulting in significant safety hazards, report Journal writers Andy Pasztor and Christopher Conkey.

According to people familiar with the issue, American will claim that FAA headquarters overruled local agency managers and insisted on a tougher enforcement plan literally overnight. The ruling from FAA headquarters came in the wake of a public uproar over maintenance lapses at Southwest Airlines. The tougher course came after the FAA's removal of Thomas Stuckey, who had been the head of the agency's flight-standards office for the southwestern U.S., overseeing both Southwest and American.

The American report comes as legislation aimed at reforming the troubled FAA remained bogged down in the Senate last Thursday amid wrangling over proposals to attach to the measure provisions for highway funding and tax issues.

The chronology outlined in American's report - which the airline contends highlights divisions inside the agency over the MD-80 wiring issue - is likely to help shape future debate over FAA enforcement policies and practices. The document also is expected to mention other alleged FAA inconsistencies or reversals, which American blames for its problems last month.

American's report stressed that the airline believed it complied fully with the intent of a 2006 safety directive from the FAA. As early as 2004, American helped Boeing develop industrywide safety bulletins for voluntary MD-80 wiring fixes. The airline then relied on those guidelines to finish all of its own inspections and modifications by late 2006, or 16 months before the federal compliance deadline. The FAA's mandatory directive slightly changed some technical criteria for doing the wiring work, and the agency ultimately determined that American didn't comply with those subsequent requirements.