Loose Seats Prompts Grounding of 8 American Airlines Planes

Loose Seats Prompts Grounding of 8 American Airlines Planes

www.claimsjournal.com

A Wall Street Journal story on Monday said the FAA is looking into why a dozen or more rows of seats on one of the planes were not properly secured, adding that the planes being evaluated had recently undergone maintenance.

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Related News Links:
www.nbcphiladelphia .com
articles.chicagotribune.com

This is most likely nothing, but my mom (who is not into conspiracy related material whatsoever) tonight randomly asked me to look into this recent news story as she thought it was suspicious. She knows I am a researcher and investigator of sorts, so she sought my help in finding a little more info and in turn I'm posting it here to see if anyone here has any thoughts.

Nothing out of the ordinary on the surface, and I'm still doing some digging around, but basically I've learned to trust my gut when following certain investigations and I thought it odd my mom asked me about this. As I said, this is most likely nothing, but I do find it strange that multiple airlines were grounded due to "loose seats" supposedly due to a certain mechanism called a seat lock plunger that isn't functioning properly or hasn't been installed properly.

It seems that these planes had recently had maintenance performed, so it would seem everything would be up to code on these flights. Then again, having undergone recent maintenance, maybe someone wasn't doing their job very well that day and screwed up.

I find it to be quite the coincidence, however. Firstly, they seem to have received maintenance at different places. So what are the chances of them all having the same problem? Secondly, at first it was only a few flights, but on Friday they said that 44 planes would be grounded to fix the problem. This seems to lower the chances of it being a mishap.

I suppose it could be a long-overdue problem that finally came to fruition this week.. but again, what are the chances of all of their seats coming loose within a couple days of each other?

Is this a cover story of some sort? I cannot really theorize due to lack of information, but does anyone else find this fishy?

www.claimsjournal.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by PatriotGames2


Except that American is in Chapter 11, and doing everything it can to piss off their unions. I believe they also outsourced this maintenance. All the effected aircraft are aircraft that they modified. However, now they are trying to claim that the passengers are at least partly to blame. They just came out and said that spilled food and drinks are part of the reason the lock plungers, which were installed backwards, failed. But only on three aircraft.

reply to post by Zaphod58


3 at first were grounded, but there are now 48 that will receive maintenance at their next stop for the supposed problem. Seems like an awful lot having the same issue at once.

reply to post by PatriotGames2


They're not receiving maintenance, they're being inspected. American has 48 757s in inventory. Since that's the type that had the seat come loose, they're checking them all.

Originally posted by PatriotGames2
reply to post by Zaphod58

 

3 at first were grounded, but there are now 48 that will receive maintenance at their next stop for the supposed problem. Seems like an awful lot having the same issue at once.

I think there are two ways of looking at this...

They could have found the problem on one plane, realized that they didn't have a system in place to monitor it or fix it, and then sent an alert out to all others to check the stability of seats - hence so many being discovered.

Or, they are grounding them for some other reason, and using this as cover. It could be, if they are in financial trouble, that they are covering for a financial inability to fly and don't want to spook the markets or are avoiding something else happening.

My money is on the first option. I think they found this problem, realized it wasn't being properly checked historically, and sent out a memo. Then they found the same problem on others and that's led to this looking odd. I can't imagine checking the bolts on seats is going to always be on a maintenance sheet, but maybe I'm wrong. It just seems like something they could have easily missed before and suddenly discovered is a potential problem.

reply to post by detachedindividual


The three that were grounded actually had to divert our return to their departure airport, because the seats came loose in flight. The others were grounded to inspect their seats, because the primary cause, despite what American says, is that the lock bracket was installed backwards.

reply to post by Zaphod58


Um, yeah. I don't know what the difference is.

3 were grounded with emergency landings. The rest are receiving maintenance, or "being inspected" to see if they have the same issue. I'm not on the line so I don't see what they are specifically doing with the planes except making sure the plunge seat bracket or whatever it's called is in place.

Thanks for your help clarifying....

reply to post by PatriotGames2


American is making themselves a laughing stock over this. They are trying to deflect blame for the brackets being installed backwards by claiming that spilled food and drink played a role in their failure.