FAA orders inspection of thousands of Boeing 737s

Boeing has been struggling lately: After two crashes to its 737 Max airliners in 2018 and 2019 left 346 dead in total, the entire line was grounded for months and subsequent investigations showed the builder rushed outside the job with poor quality software And without sufficient supervision of industry-friendly regulators. Now the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered unrelated, but urgent, inspections of thousands of Boeing planes.

According to Reuters, the FAA has asked all operators of Boeing 737 series aircraft to perform repeated inspections of cabin altitude pressure switches, which helps ensure that aircraft remain properly pressurized during flight. Failure of switches (two of which are in each aircraft for redundancy) could result in incapacitation of pilots, flight crew or passengers. The order applies to 2,502 aircraft registered in the United States and is expected to impact 9,315 more around the world. Although the FAA does not have legal authority over airplanes flown exclusively outside the United States, Bloomberg reported, it is almost certain that foreign regulators will issue similar orders or that foreign 737 operators will perform such inspections even if they are not legally mandated.

According to Reuters, control order follows reports in September 2020 from an operator that the switches failed on three different 737 aircraft models, although the FAA did not indicate in its order that there had been everything reports that the outages occurred in the middle of a flight. The news agency wrote that after the initial report, Boeing conducted its own investigation and determined there was no problem. But the FAA and Boeing re-examined the matter and determined in May 2021 that “the failure rate of the two switches is much higher than initially estimated, and therefore poses a safety concern.” The FAA wrote that it “does not yet have sufficient information to determine what caused this surprisingly high failure rate,” Reuters added.

Testing must be completed within 2,000 flight hours of the last switch test, 2,000 flight hours from distribution control, or within 90 days, whichever occurs first.

“Safety is our top priority and we fully support the FAA leadership in mandating the inspection interval we assigned to the fleet in June,” Boeing wrote in a statement to news outlets.