Category Archives for Aircraft.
As the aircraft climbed through 12,000 feet, the left engine “emitted a series of bangs and streaks of flames.” Pilots returned to the airport after advising air traffic control of an engine stall, and the plane landed safely around 35 minutes after departure. United assigned another aircraft to operate the flight and passengers were delayed a little over 3 hours.
All seems pretty normal, right? Well, two things are notable about this flight:
An Air Canada Boeing 777 was struck by lightning as it departed Vancouver and continued to London’s Heathrow airport. It was inspected on arrival. Video of the strike happening is impressive!
While American Airlines hasn’t made changes to its partner award pricing – yet, they’re warning they will! – those awards, which are the best part of the AAdvantage program, have become far less valuable. Almost across the board their partners have been restricting the ability of AAdvantage members to redeem their miles.
VistaJet’s flight VJT993, a Bombardier Global Express,, is operating as “The Football Era.” It is currently estimated in over an hour early, at 3:07 p.m. Pacific time.
Reportedly charter provider VistaJet made two unique preparations, besides having the plane ready for Ms. Swift’s swift departure following her Tokyo show.
The Boeing 737 MAX 9 was temporarily grounded – and tremendous faith was lost in Boeing – after a the left mid exit door plug detached from Alaska Airlines aircraft N704AL while performing flight 1282 from Portland, Oregon to Ontario, California.
The NTSB has now issued a report on what happened, and it tracks what readers of View From The Wing already know: the plane left the factory missing bolts to hold the door plug on, and tracking of defects at Boeing seems to be a problem.
Avion Express flight 8242 from Milan Bergamo airport in Italy to Vilnius, Lithuania landed on the airport’s runway 19. It “veered right off the runway onto soft ground” and then proceeded to make another turn and head off the grass and back onto the runway instead of coming to a stop. The Lithuanian airline’s Airbus A320 then taxied onto the apron.
Pilot unions will fight against continued loss in jobs, and very few would push the button today to go from two to one human in the cockpit. But the technology will arrive that will make travel much safer replacing a human at least as co-pilot. And at that point pilot unions will be clearly lobbying against safety.
The Alaska Airlines incident occurred after market close on Friday. By the time markets opened on Monday, the value of Boeing stock had fallen by $12 billion. As Matt Levine observes, the cost to shareholders was far greater than to passengers on the Alaska flight.
Kirby is apparently seeking management changes at Boeing after losing confidence in the planemaker. Whether Boeing’s CEO stays or goes may rest with the federal government.
A reader at respected airline industry site Leeham News offered a comment that suggests they have access to Boeing’s internal quality control systems, and shares details of what they saw regarding the Boeing 737 MAX 9 flown by Alaska Airlines that had a door plug detach inflight, causing rapid decompression of the aircraft.
The takeaway appears to be that outsourced plane components have so many problems when they show up at the production line that Boeing’s quality control staff can’t keep up with them all.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
