AA axe 7100+ MAX flights from 2019 schedule
 

I just read a memo stating that 7100+ AA 737 MAX flights have just been axed from their 2019 schedule. With only a handful of 737 MAX aircraft in the AA fleet, I imagine this is several months worth of flights now binned completely...?

Posting in case of interest re the MAX, I was unsure of which thread to post in though so please feel free to move to an existing one if appropriate.

Assuming a five sector day (a guess) and a fleet of 24 aircraft thats about 60 days worth of flights.

Assumming it is just summer schedule that is circa 40 flights a day................ hardly noticeable if you fly JFK to ORD 12 times a day instead of 14.

I see in The Times today that Ryan Air are said to be reducing their services from Stansted to Edinburgh and Belfast from around 4 times a day to 2 or 4 times a week. Seems rather drastic but is surmised to be as a result of the 737 MAX delivery delays.

I bet O' Leary's 10 million per Max frame offer is already in.

Kayak Travel online booking engine added an ‘Aircraft Type’ Filter After the Second 737 MAX Crash - So you can choose not to fly on one...very handy

Nobody throws away billions of $$

Of course the plane will fly again.

If a PR program doesn't work because of poisoned mindsets, then a fresh coat of paint and a new grandfathered type certificate as a spoonful of sugar will make the medicine go down

Awww, just re-name all the range from -300 to -900 Classics, and make the -8 & -9 the -800 NG and -900 NG
NOW, if B actually does that, witness ye all that it was originally my idea :)

Once a fix is implemented, the certification authorities lift the grounding (I suspect in unison, at least the FAA won't be the first), and the first few flights are perfectly routine, the media will quickly lose interest, passengers will forget whether they're on a Boeing or an Airbus, and the whole thing will be forgotten by 99.9% of the traveling public.

For those of us old enough to remember the DC10 story , this looks similar but also worse to me . (for those who are too young look here : have a look here : dc10 grounding 1979 )
Anyway back then the pax voted with their feet afterwards and it took a year or so to fade. But I agree today with social media and instant internet info, this could have a much longer effect . I think a new name will be needed as well. and the marketing value of "Max" is gone for a long time .. I cannot see Ford continuing to calls some of its cars C or S "Max" in the future.

Yes, and take a few pictures and post on your facebook and tweet, some news channel will find them and the airline will have to scramble the PR specialists! Even better if another pax will take a video of that happening...

Trouble is with all the alliances unless you book a single flight with an airbus operator, you could end up flying code share on anything. Some years ago my wife booked Air NZ Auckland/Adelaide return but on the flight home found the Air NZ return sector had been cancelled. So, she was put on a Qantas 737 to Sydney where she then boarded a Star Alliance Airbus Lan Chile A340 to Auckland!

This has been a textbook FUBAR for Boeing PR

At one level it was never going to end well - Boeing implemented a system that COMPLETELY UNINTENTIONALLY but nevertheless factually caused an upset in which a plane and all its SOB were lost. We have not had the Final Report, but if we know it now, and indeed knew it then, then Boeing knew it even better.

At that point Boeing had the opportunity to 'own up', publicly, big splash, here is what we are doing about it, consider grounding the fleet until it could be demonstrated to be safe. But it chose not to, issuing an AD to the effect that aircrew should already know what they need to about runaway trim.

That was sufficient only in the case that there was not another event. But there was.

Even THEN Boeing did not choose to ground the fleet but it was left to overseas authorities to push the FAA into action.

All this drains confidence from the 'consumer' (including the professional flying community as the threads on this forum demonstrate).

I would say that the time between fix and confidence returning is something like the time from original incident to Boeing appearing to take the issue with "sufficient seriousness" x 4 or 5

And I don't think we have reached that point of inflection yet - the sense given is still of 'we can swiftly provide a fix through a software mod and hope to have the frame re-certified as soon as possible', rather than 'we need to be very very sure that this cannot happen again so WE will not release the aircraft for certification until WE are sure it's right'

Boeing as a manufacturer has No means to ground a fleet so as to damage the goods that others have purchased. Boeing's responsibility is to provide fixes for known problems with a suitable reccomendation for incorporation (ALL this under the rule of Continued Airworthiness).

As what they knew or didn't know at the time of their initial responses, that is TBD in the onward investigations

The same goes for the FAA who are dependent on Boeing for analysis of the data coming in from a field event and in-house testing, all which take time.

There is an underlying mode of operation that you don't prematurely ground fleets unless you have a path for ungroundings by identifying an unsafe action/design to bring the certificate back into compliance.

Many posters have a sense that simply discussing fatalities equates to instant groundings of whole fleets rather than finding means for restrictions on how they are flown with what fixes..

Personally (without data so just an hunch) I would have restricted the fleet to only fly with crews that were ably to comply with the restrictions needs. Of course that would have taken time to requalify crews but at least that gives the user operator more control over his costs and operations.

from a Sr Fellow in Continued Airworthiness