Today Bombardier told airlines to ground 60 of its Q400s after two of the planemaker’s aircraft experienced landing gear failures in one week.
According to Bloomberg, “All Q400s with more than 10,000 cycles — comprising a takeoff and landing — should be grounded until they’re inspected, Montreal-based Bombardier said today.” The landing gear was made by Goodrich Corp. of the U.S., Bombardier added.
The grounding does include aircraft flown by Alaska Airlines regional airline, Horizon Air, as well as a number of international airlines.
Apparently both landing gear incidents occurred in Europe and neither incident involved any fatalities.
You can read the article here.
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Technorati Tags: airlines, Alaska Airlines, Bombardier, Horizon Airlines
It’s a rough day at QX for sure, but they deserve major props (pun most definitely intended) for working to keep the rest of their operations running as smooth as they can today…
According to FlightStats data as of 11:30AM PDT, QX had 114 cancellations. Despite that (and the airport melee that is sure to ensue), QX is running 89% on-time for departures and 93% on-time for arrivals so far today. I think that’s pretty remarkable.
That is remarkable. It’s a shame on the Q400s, as the plane has received nothing but good comments from the airlines now using it — with the exception of the usual new airplane teething issues.
Having been on one, I have to say it is one impressive airplane — and would seem to be one that fits a very nice niche for so many airlines.
I liked the way Bombardier went out of its way today to make sure we all knew who MADE the landing gear.
If you have not seen the video of the SAS crash in Denmark, here’s the link:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ed8_1189365556
Glad there were no serious injuries.
Reuters story on the crash via Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070909/wl_nm/denmark_plane_dc