Ryanair is proving to be a good friend in a crisis for Boeing. Last week, the Irish airline confirmed it is providing extra on-location production oversight for the 737 Max program.
25.01.2024 - 06:49 / skift.com / Scott Kirby / Toby Enqvist / Mike Whitaker / Meghna Maharishi
The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it is halting any production expansion of the Boeing 737 Max, after a door plug suddenly fell off an Alaska Airlines jet.
“This won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing,” FAA chief Mike Whitaker said in a statement. “We will not agree to any request from Boeing for an expansion in production or approve additional production lines for the 737 MAX until we are satisfied that the quality control issues uncovered during this process are resolved.”
However, airlines that operate the Max 9 can begin the inspection process of existing aircraft. Once the inspections of each existing Max 9 are complete, they can return to service.
United Airlines expects to return the Max 9 to service by Sunday, chief operations officer Toby Enqvist wrote to employees in a memo reviewed by Skift on Wednesday. Alaska said in a statement it expects each inspection to take 12 hours, and the planes would resume flying on Friday.
The federal agency had paused inspections of the Max 9, saying Boeing needed to revise instructions for maintenance after Alaska and United found some loose hardware in their initial inspections of the aircraft.
The Alaska incident has put Boeing under scrutiny over its quality control processes. As a result of the weeks-long grounding, United and Alaska have canceled hundreds of flights daily. United said in a filing on Monday that it was forecasting a first quarter loss due to the grounding.
United and Alaska CEOs also both expressed frustration and disappointment with the U.S. planemaker in televised interviews on Tuesday. United CEO Scott Kirby said the carrier was reconsidering its fleet plan to not include the Max 10, which has been hampered by regulatory and delivery delays, in a call with analysts on Tuesday.
Whitaker also said the FAA was stepping up its oversight of Boeing after the incident.
“The quality assurance issues we have seen are unacceptable,” Whitaker said. “That is why we will have more boots on the ground closely scrutinizing and monitoring production and manufacturing activities.”
As part of its increased oversight, the FAA said it would have a greater floor presence at Boeing facilities and launch an investigation on the planemaker’s compliance with manufacturing requirements.
Boeing is expected to report fourth quarter earnings on January 31.
Ryanair is proving to be a good friend in a crisis for Boeing. Last week, the Irish airline confirmed it is providing extra on-location production oversight for the 737 Max program.
The vast majority of Boeing 737 Max 9s are back in service.
While the Boeing 737 Max 9 is back in service, the fallout for the U.S. planemaker is far from over.
Four bolts appeared to be missing on a door plug that blew off from a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.
After three weeks of being grounded, the Boeing 737 Max 9 is returning to service.
The Boeing 737-9 Max was cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) this week to return to scheduled service for the first time since a harrowing Alaska Airlines incident on January 5 cast doubt on the plane’s safety. Both Alaska and United, the only two U.S. carriers that operate the model, said that flights on the Max 9 will start as early as this weekend. But the question remains: Will passengers also return, or will they steer clear of the troubled jet?
A major travel search engine is giving people the option of excluding flights using Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft from its results.
Alaska Airlines said Thursday the Boeing 737 Max 9 grounding will cost it $150 million and that the airline would hold Boeing accountable.
Southwest Airlines is removing the Boeing 737 Max 7 from its 2024 fleet plans due to certification delays.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has laid out a path for the beleaguered Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft to return to service as soon as Friday after a mid-air blowout grounded the planes.
It appears Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft will begin returning to the skies in the coming days after the planes were grounded in the wake of a harrowing incident on an Alaska Airlines flight earlier this month in which a door plug explosively blew out of an aircraft during flight.
Boeing is slated to deliver a 737 Max to a Chinese airline for the first time since March 2019, according to Bloomberg.