Alaska Airlines progressively restarted flights with its Boeing 737 MAX 9 fleet on Friday, three weeks after a mid-flight panel blowout and emergency landing necessitated extensive aircraft inspections.
Flight 1146 from Seattle to San Diego arrived in California at 6:14 pm, 90 minutes after its scheduled departure time of 2:20 pm.
The voyage follows the Federal Aviation Administration’s announcement on Wednesday of a maintenance and inspection program to allow the MAX 9 to resume operation.
Alaska Airlines said it anticipates inspections on its 65 MAX 9 jets to be completed by the end of next week, allowing it to resume operations.
“Each of our 737-9 MAX will return to service only after the rigorous inspections are completed and each plane is deemed airworthy according to FAA requirements”, Alaska Airlines continued.
It went on to say, “The individual inspections are expected to take up to 12 hours per aircraft”.
The FAA grounded 171 MAX 9 jets with a comparable configuration to that of the January 5 incident, in which a door stopper blew out mid-flight.
While no one was seriously wounded in the incident, inspectors have stated that it could have been devastating.
The grounding caused 3,000 Alaska Airlines flight cancellations in January. The business said Thursday that it anticipates the grounding to cost it $150 million.
United Airlines, which has the largest fleet of Boeing models affected by the grounding order, said Thursday that the maiden flight of one of its aircraft will be on Sunday, but did not rule out returning to service sooner.
The US Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is investigating the circumstances surrounding the January 5 incident, stated on Friday that one of its investigators was scheduled to return to Boeing’s Renton facility in Washington state the same day.
“The team of investigators will establish a chronology from the production stages to the in-flight accident”, the NTSB added.
A report on the probe is due next week.
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