WN is returning flights to normal at a fairly fast cliip but even a 10% cancellation rate is a bit misleading since their OT rating for Sunday was in the mid 60s, 20 points lower than most of their network peers with similar sized networks. Granted pulling 15% of the fleet is a major event but business travelers will likely avoid WN for this week if there is a choice given that WN is a ways from returning to a stable operation.... the current headline on Fox News doesn't help.
SOUTH-MESSED: More Cracks in Jets...
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The media is not necessarily your friend in these types of situations but airlines are highly public companies.. that is just part of the nature of the business.
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I believe there was a recent AA 757 incident that involved similar metal issues so the issue is not just a 737 problem....I don't know how similar or dissimilar the construction is on the 737 vs the 757 but other than the 737 esp. as used by WN being high cycle aircraft, there probably are more similarities than not.
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The question still remains whether sufficient techniques exist to identify these problems and if WN was using them; given that there appear to be similar issues with the 757, there will also be questions about whether sufficiently extensive inspections are being done on those aircraft.
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WN came out very early this weekend and said that it had done all of the required inspections on Friday's aircraft. Also, Boeing supposedly was coming out w/ a service bulletin, indicating the problems were not covered by previous directives. If so, then the issues of whether there was outsourcing or not are not near as important as whether inspections were sufficient.
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Finally, while I know there are a whole lot of people who get worked up with foreign maintenance work, I have yet to see evidence that it is statistically worse off or than US based maintenance is statistcally better. If you - and Congress - want to be able to say with certainty that there is a problem w/ outsourced or foreign maintenance, then there has to be hard statistics to say that. While there are no shortage of anecdotes - and I don't doubt them - there has to be solid statistics to really show that foreign maintenance bases or even US based MROs aren't cutting it.
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At the end of the day, the individual airline is responsible for its airplanes and the maintenance on them regardless of where it is done.