SFGATE contributor Jim Glab rounds up air travel and airport news for our weekly column Routes
In this week’s news, Boeing’s largest U.S. airline customers are facing disruption of their 2024 network plans because the manufacturer’s regulatory and legal problems just keep growing, creating significant delays in its aircraft production and delivery schedules; Frontier Airlines introduces a new “UpFront Plus” seating option; Alaska Airlines’ airport kiosks no longer print boarding passes; Delta Air Lines expands the rollout of its Delta Sync in-flight entertainment features; Breeze Airways revives a number of routes for the summer; a small regional carrier starts flying this weekend between Oakland and a coastal city near the Oregon border; Canada’s Porter Airlines adds another San Francisco route; Delta sets a date for the resumption of Tel Aviv service and revives flights to Venice; another airline plans Seattle-Taipei service; and Nashville’s airport gets an on-site hotel.
The airline industry’s crisis of confidence in Boeing continued to escalate this week as some U.S. carriers said their long-term fleet plans have been disrupted, threatening their expectations for growth. That comes on the heels of more regulatory and legal bad news for the manufacturer, including the results of an audit of Boeing’s quality control procedures by the Federal Aviation Administration; the Justice Department’s launching of a criminal investigation into that door plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 in January; and the sudden death of a Boeing whistleblower who was involved in legal proceedings against the company.
CNBC reported that Boeing told Southwest Airlines it could only deliver 46 new 737 Max aircraft this year, instead of the 79 737 Max 8 and Max 7 planes that the company had been expecting. Boeing had been planning to expand its 737 production this year to keep up with orders, but after the Alaska Airlines incident the FAA ordered the company to give up that expansion schedule. Southwest said it will now have to scale back its planned capacity growth and reconsider its financial forecast, and CEO Bob Jordan told an industry conference this week that “Boeing needs to become a better company.”
Alaska Airlines said in an SEC filing this week that before the FAA ordered the temporary grounding of all 737 Max 9s after the door plug incident, the company had been expecting its capacity to increase in the “low single digits” this year, but now “full year capacity expectations are still in flux due to uncertainty around the timing of aircraft deliveries as a result of increased Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Justice scrutiny on Boeing and its operations.” Earlier this year, United Airlines gave up on receiving the 80 737 Max 10s it was due to receive this year — “those aircraft aren’t even certified yet (by the FAA) and it’s impossible to know when they will arrive,” an internal company memo said, CNBC reported — and now the airline has paused the hiring of new pilots. United’s plans to receive 43 737 Max 8s and 34 Max 9s this year have been reduced to 37 and 19 respectively, and United CEO Scott Kirby this week urged Boeing to stop building Max 10s and instead to build more Max 9s.
Matt York/AP
Meanwhile, an FAA audit of Boeing’s 737 Max production facilities uncovered “dozens of problems throughout the manufacturing process,” The New York Times reported this week. The agency conducted 89 “product audits” at Boeing, and the company “failed 33 of them, with a total of 97 instances of alleged noncompliance,” the Times said. Meanwhile, Alaska Airlines told Reuters it is cooperating with a new Justice Department criminal investigation of the January door plug incident, reportedly aimed at determining whether Boeing was in compliance with an earlier legal settlement after 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019.
Source : https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/explaining-boeing-breaking-the-airline-industry-19024924.php