United Airlines has blamed Boeing for a $200m (£161m) hit to its earnings in the first three months of this year.
The carrier was forced to ground its Boeing 737 MAX 9 fleet for three weeks after a mid-air cabin blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
United said that pushed it to a pre-tax loss of $164m for the first quarter.
Alaskan Airlines as well. They kept getting pressure cabin alerts, never finding the problem, and just resetting the warning system. They even went so far as to instruct that this plane was not to go over water so it could land if it had an issue.
The door plug is absolutely on Boeing but AA was negligent on how it handled the warning it got multiple times before the blowout happened.
United Airlines says their shitty choice of vendor cost them $200M - FTFY
Was the door plug issue all of Boeing’s fault though? The airline doesn’t have any inspectors itself?
Boeing wrote the service manuals and maintainance schedule. If the airline was supposed to do a test to catch the mistake but didn’t, boeing would mention it.
A door plug is part of the fuselage, and it is hidden behind wall panels. An airline isn’t expected to disassemble the entire interior to check the structure upon taking delivery of the plane.
The pressure fault the plane had before the blowout wouldn’t have lead to a check of the door plug even if it had gotten the service before the blowout.
If you bought a car and the door just fell off while you were driving to work one day, would it be your fault for not checking the bolts?
It is much easier to check the bolts on your car door than the bolts on a door plug. They’re not hidden behind a wall like the door plug bolts.
On the other hand, airplanes come with much stricter maintenance schedules. You don’t have to replace the engine of your car every 500 hours, you might need to in an airplane.
The question is what is in the service manual. It might look unreasonable, but it’s part of the deal when buying a plane. If a competitor makes a plane that needs less maintenance, airlines will buy more of that plane.
There are like a million bolts on a plane, and not all are easily accessed or listed as things to check on regular maintenance. It sounds like these were not easily accessible.or seen and not something that would be regularly checked.
Like how a lot of bolts on cars and trains and aubways are not readily accessible or checked before the vehicle is put into seevice becsuse it is assumed that the factory’s quality control took care of them.
Regardless of what you think of rich ass corporations, this is an important liability issue. United shouldn’t be on the hook for losing money when it was Boeing’s fault
Then they should.sue Boeing like any other business. Picking a faulty vendor means sorting it out with the vendor.
There ought to be an outright ban on Boeing airplanes and a class action lawsuit against the company for putting peoples’ lives in danger and causing reputation damages to flight companies.
All I hear us how much United Airlines makes in earnings in 3 weeks on a slice of their business.
