The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has wrapped up a months-long safety probe into United Airlines after the Chicago-based carrier made international headlines for a string of embarrassing mishaps and accidents, concluding that there aren’t any “significant safety issues” at the arline.
The FAA launched the rare safety investigation in March following a slew of mishaps, which included an incident in which the landing gear of a United 737MAX collapsed after the plane rolled onto the grass at the end of the runway at Houston Intercontinental Airport on March 8.
Just a day before that accident, a tire fell off a United Boeing 777 as it took off from San Francisco International Airport. The tire fell into an employee parking lot and badly damaged several vehicles. The flight was then forced to make an emergency landing.
There were several other mishaps in the following weeks, which included a United flight from Dallas Fort Worth to San Francisco that suffered a hydraulic leak shortly before landing on March 14
A day later, a 25-year-old United Airlines Boeing 737-800 with 145 passengers onboard lost an external fuselage panel mid-flight after departing San Francisco Airport.
When the FAA made its extraordinary intervention, United’s vice president of corporate safety, Sasha Johnson, the carrier ‘welcomed’ the heightened scrutiny and was “very open to hear from them about what they find and their perspective on things we may need to change to make us even safer.”
The probe meant that United was not allowed to open routes to new cities, although that ban was lifted in May.
United had been hoping to launch new nonstop flights to Cebu, Philippines, and Faro, Portugal, this summer, but the safety probe forced both route launches to be pushed back.
Despite the embarrassing nature of the string of safety mishaps, the FAA has wrapped up its investigation after coming to the conclusion that there were no significant safety issues at the airline.
A separate FAA safety probe into Southwest Airlines which was launched in July is, however, still in progress. The FAA’s attention shifted to Southwest after an alarming number of recent mishaps.
In the last few months alone, these include a Southwest 737 descending to just 150 feet of Tampa Bay, as well as a plane taking off from a closed runway and an investigation into a ‘Dutch Roll’ incident that damaged an aircraft.
