American Airlines is cancelling 90 flights per day through June 5 due to the B737 MAX groundinng. This indicates much more time is needed to solve the issues with the MCAS system that has been implicated in both the Lion Air and the Ethiopian crashes.
Boeing is pulling back production of the B737 MAX, cutting production by close to 20 percent. Although one airline, Garuda, is seeking to cancel their order, analysts say it is unlikely at this point that others will follow suit due to the complexities of the market and lack of suitable, available alternatives.
Meanwhile, it is being reported that a bad sensor on the Lion Air B737 MAX that crashed in October and had issues on the previous day’s flight, was sent for repairs at a U.S. aircraft maintenance facility. “Accident investigators in Indonesia, home of Lion Air, and the U.S., where Boeing Co., the plane’s manufacturer, is based, have been examining the work that a Florida repair shop previously performed on the so-called angle-of-attack sensor, according to briefing documents prepared for Indonesia’s parliament,” according to a report in Bloomberg.
That report goes on to say that repair station XTRA Aerospace Inc. in Miramar, Florida, had worked on the sensor as noted in documents obtained by Bloomberg, and that Indonesian investigators are seeking data from the repair station. The preliminary report released by Indonesia says the sensor involved in the crash wasn’t working from the time it was installed. It doesn’t say why it wasn’t working but maintenance is being investigated in that accident.