Southwest Airlines Maintains Its Boeing 737 MAX in the Desert Until It Can Fly Again

The Southwest American airline has begun to focus its Boeing 737 MAX, whose commercial activity was banned worldwide after two tragedies in less than six months, at an isolated airport in the Mojave Desert, California.

With a fleet of 34 units, Southwest is the world's largest operator of the aircraft, one of the most modern products of American society that is now under the magnifying glbad for an alleged design error in an automated system that would have caused the recent accidents in Indonesia and Ethiopia, which resulted in 346 deaths in total.

The images published on social networks show that at least 19 of these 737 MAXs are already at Southern California's logistics airport in Victorville, former airbase used today for freight transport, business flights and military flights, but not for pbadenger transport.

According to the journalist of the chain ABC Sam Sweeney, who distributed one of the videos of the fleet stuck on the groundSouthwest's decision to concentrate all its 737 MAXs in one place seems to indicate that the ban should not increase rapidly.

As a result of actions taken by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Southwest had to cancel 137 flights for which there is currently no replacement.

In fact, many airlines around the world have problems in locating their planes while investigations continue. American Airlines, owner of 24 of these planes, she has not yet decided where she will take them while United Airlines, with 14 people in the inventory, sent them to a commercial airport and a maintenance base, both in Houston, Texas.

Other important users are Air Canada, with 23 units, Norwegian, with 18, and Air China and China Southern Airlines, with 16 and 15 aircraft each.

In total, Boeing has delivered in recent years about 380 737 MAX that are now stranded on land around the world, pending the completion of the investigations, the solution of the problem and a new certification of the model, which could take several months or more.

The Boeing 737 MAX entered service in 2017 and soon he became a success in sales of the American company because it's a quieter plane, more efficient in terms of fuel consumption and with a greater degree of automation.

Alarms, however, skyrocketed in October, when an aircraft of this type piloted by the airline Lion Air crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 189 people.

The first investigations revealed a failure of aircraft sensors that caused the erratic and fatal behavior of the modern automated MCAS system, what the pilots, to not know their existence, could not thwart.

In March, another Boeing 737 MAX, this time from Ethiopian Airlines, He also fell to the ground shortly after taking off, killing 157 people. Although investigations into this latest incident have not yet been made publicit is thought that the same thing would have happened and, as a result, various airlines and national aviation authorities have begun to ban this model.

The FAA and Boeing were the last to do so, but they also announced a similar measure, which eventually slowed the operations of 380 aircraft worldwide. In this way, The US manufacturer has already announced a series of changes to the MCAS software through which it hopes to solve the problem and re-certify the aircraft.