United 777 plane made less than half of the flights cleared between checks: sources

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A United Airlines plane equipped with a Pratt & Whitney engine that broke down on Saturday had made less than half of the flights cleared by U.S. regulators between fan blade inspections, two sources said. informed.

The Boeing Co 777 aircraft had completed nearly 3,000 cycles, which equates to one take-off and landing, which compares to checks every 6,500 cycles prescribed after a separate United engine incident in 2018, the sources said.

They sought anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly. United declined to comment.

Pratt, the maker of the PW4000 engines, on Monday advised airlines to step up checks every 1,000 cycles, in a bulletin seen by Reuters. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said it was ordering immediate inspections of 777 planes with PW4000 engines before they could resume their flight, going further than Pratt.

The engines are used on 128 older versions of the aircraft, representing less than 10% of the more than 1,600,777 delivered and only a handful of airlines in the United States, South Korea and Japan recently operated them.

Japan and South Korea have also grounded planes for fan blade checks.

On Monday, the FAA acknowledged that after an engine crash at Japan Airlines (JAL) PW4000 in December, it had considered stepping up inspections of blades that use thermoacoustic imaging to detect signs of metal fatigue.

A risk assessment meeting was held last week to discuss the issue ahead of United’s engine failure on Saturday, one of the sources said, confirming an earlier report from CNN. No decision was imminent before the United incident, the source added.

A spokeswoman for Pratt, owned by Raytheon Technologies, said on Wednesday that the fan blades should be shipped to its repair station in East Hartford, Connecticut for final inspections, including those in Japan and the United States. South Korea.

Each engine has 22 blades that must be individually removed and each will take eight hours to inspect, FAA Administrator Steve Dickson told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday.

That’s the equivalent of 352 hours of work per plane, with each 777 fitted with two engines. Boeing said 69 of the planes were on active duty before Saturday’s incident, while 59 were grounded amid low demand during the pandemic.

Pratt did not respond to questions about how many engines he could inspect per month. United did not comment on how long they expect the inspections to take, while JAL and ANA Holdings said the timing was not clear.

(This story corrects to remove the superfluous words “and” in paragraph 11)