glitchy

They've been sending a lot of the MAX 9s through OKC lately, presumably taking planes to AAR who does a lot of modification and maintenance work for Alaska.

I suspect it's a mix of farming out some of the return-to-service inspections to AAR and Alaska taking the opportunity to get pending upgrade work done. ("These things are grounded from revenue service for a while, may as well get those pending mods dealt with.") The original incident airplane also spent ten days at AAR in December for a wifi install which was enough to have some fingers pointed their way but they claim to have gone nowhere near that door.

If anyone's curious about the comings and goings, here's the flightaware link for all MAX 9s flying at the moment. (It includes operators of the high-density config that never stopped flying, so you'll see lots of Copa and Fly Dubai and a few others.) Alaska has had a bunch of repo flights over the last couple of days, mostly unpressurized (altitude around 10k), but some at normal cruise altitudes like the HNL-PDX flight happening right now as AS9822. United has been absent until recently but right now they've got one slogging back from Cancun to Houston at 10k, flying the coast instead of right across the Caribbean.

jiburi

Seem another Max already in-service, inbound to Portland from Las Vegas. AS621.All seats occupied. Lucky standby passenger CHO/C was assigned 26A.

Jiburi

AKLifetimeFlyer

maybe the passenger’s name is Courageous Choice

VirtuousKangaroo

Seems it was AS COO, Constance von Muehlen.

Smart PR move, especially with news crews in attendance.

ashill

Notable (and not surprising to me): most of the passengers CNN interviewed didn’t know it was a -9 flight until told be news crews.

rune87

Should have been Ben, but you know he aint willing to risk it....send the COO instead.

AKLifetimeFlyer

My Sunday morning ANC-PDX Flight 198 leg of an ANC-PDX-ORD trip was just switched from a 739 to a 7M9. I had booked a refundable DL backup flight for this very reason. My AS flight is scheduled to depart 1:06AM. My DL flight is scheduled to depart shortly thereafter. In case my AS flight is cancelled, I assume I have up until the scheduled departure time to cancel my DL flight for a refund (I sure hope).

xliioper

Delta refundable fares can currently be cancelled before or after departure for refund for domestic and ex-US fares. Some refundable fares with outside US origin require cancellation before departure for refund.

jiburi

Is there any report of AS back to near 100% completion?! I think earlier report indicated it would be near normal by this weekend…

Jiburi

navydevildoc

AS Only cancelled 4 flights yesterday, or 3% of the schedule. Huge improvement from the 25%-30% we were seeing when this was peak insanity.

https://www.flightaware.com/live/cancelled/yesterday

sltlyamusd

The flexible travel policy banner has also been removed from the homepage. I only see one flight canceled so far today on flightaware and it is on a 738.

notquiteaff

Did AS (and UA) get all MAX9 inspected? And, I wonder, did they fly their own mechanics to some out stations where aircraft were stranded, or did they send the instructions to some local contract mechanic? I believe UA, for example, had four MAX9 parked at CUN.

Finally, are we ever going to find out what number “many” represented when Ben said they found many aircraft with loose bolts? Is that going to be in some FAA or NTSB report?

LegalTender

No, probably not.

Statistics prove the unrivaled safety of dirigible travel!

sltlyamusd

They were allowed to fly the planes unpressurized at 10k feet to maintenance bases for the purposes of inspection. I know someone posted here an example of a Max 9 ferried from DEN-OKC for inspection at AAR. Not sure how widely this occurred.

jhoehn

I would think that after inspection seat 26A would be the safest spot on a Max9?