Back in March, United Airlines (UAL) CEO Scott Kirby sent the airline's customers a letter acknowledging a "number of incidents that are reminders of the importance of safety."
Within a few weeks of each other, the engine of a Boeing 737-900ER (BA) plane caught on fire after taking off from Houston for Fort Myers, and a Boeing 777 lost a wheel on the runway at San Francisco Airport. The plane carrying more than 300 people was about to take off on a nearly 11-hour flight to Japan.
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Kirby reiterated that each incident was unrelated and that leadership was "reviewing the details of each case to understand what happened" but the hit to its reputation as the airline where "things have been going wrong" had already been done.
'The wheel has been recovered in Los Angeles'
On July 8, another incident mirroring what took place in March occurred with a Boeing 757-200 during takeoff from Los Angeles International Airport — the nearly 30-year-old jet lost a landing-gear wheel as it was soaring into the sky but continued on to its destination in Denver and was able to make a safe landing.
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"The wheel has been recovered in Los Angeles, and we are investigating what caused this event," a United Airlines representative said in a statement on the incident. The flight had been carrying 174 passengers and 7 crew members and lost the wheel at around 6:53 a.m. (the flight landed safely at 10:51 a.m. Denver time.) The type of Boeing 757-200 plane being used for the flight has not been produced since 2004.
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United has grappled with reputational and production problems. How will it emerge?
While wheels occasionally come off during takeoff and are not necessarily a reason to divert the flight (as in the case of the United flight, the pilot made the call to continue on to Denver), United has faced increased scrutiny after the string of incidents that occurred since the start of the year.
It is also a major customer of Boeing while the aircraft manufacturer is currently facing a criminal investigation over an Alaska Airlines (ALK) flight in which a door panel of a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane blew out mid-flight on top of pleading guilty on July 7 to conspiring to defraud the federal government in an investigation of what went wrong during two 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019.
With production of Boeing planes facing serious delays amid the investigation, airlines that rely on it for supply (which, given the scope of the manufacturer would be most airlines) have had to rearrange their flight networks and not run a number of planned flights.
In April, United indefinitely delayed a route between Newark International Airport (EWR) and Faro in Portugal's Algarve region that it had announced to great fanfare a few months earlier. Low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines (SAVE) had earlier also had to cancel a route to the newly-built Felipe Carrillo Puerto International Airport in Mexico's Tulum amid a widespread recall of the engines that go into the Airbus A321neo (EADSF) it had planned to use for the flight.
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