The FAA said on Wednesday that an initial round of inspections of 40 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes had been completed, but that those aircraft and scores of other Max 9 planes would remain grounded as the agency finalized an inspection process for them. On Friday, the FAA announced that it was requiring the 40 inspections before it would approve new inspection and maintenance instructions developed by Boeing. The agency grounded 171 Max 9 planes this month after a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines flight while it was ascending after taking off from Portland, Ore., forcing an emergency landing. In its statement on Wednesday, the FAA said it would review the data from the 40 inspections, and that the 737 Max 9 planes with the door panels would remain grounded until the agency signed off on the instructions for airlines to inspect the planes. The door panels go where an emergency exit door would in a different configuration of the aircraft. “The safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning these aircraft to service,” the agency said in the statement. Last week, the FAA announced it was investigating whether Boeing failed to ensure that the 737 Max 9 was safe and conformed to the design approved by the agency. The incident involving the Alaska Airlines flight did not result in any serious injuries, but it could have been far graver had it occurred when the plane was at its cruising altitude. In its statement on Wednesday, the FAA said it was “investigating Boeing’s manufacturing practices and production lines, including those involving subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems,” which produces the fuselage of the 737 Max.<br/>
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Investigators probing why part of a Boeing 737 Max 9 blew open mid-flight earlier this month have not yet determined if bolts were installed on that piece of the aircraft. NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy told reporters after a closed-door briefing for lawmakers Wednesday that the investigation into is ongoing. Investigators are determining why a door plug, which is supposed to cover up a space left by a removed emergency exit door in the side of the plane, blew off Alaska Airlines flight 1282 on January 5 and left a gaping hole in the side of the plane. She said the investigation is not solely focused on the bolts, and her teams are currently collecting extensive records on the assembly of the door plug and its journey from Malaysia, where it was first built, to factories in Wichita, Kansas and Renton, Washington. It was unclear, she said, whether Boeing employees removed the plug from the airplane fuselage when it arrived in Renton from its subcontractor, Spirit Areosystems. Scientists in the NTSB’s lab are currently scrutinizing the plug but have not yet started disassembling it, she said. “They have very bright lighting. They’re doing targeted photography,” Homendy said. “They might take some metal shavings and put them under the electron microscope.” Then next week, NTSB officials will begin pulling the door plug apart to further examine its construction. Homendy said she and the head of the FAA, who participated in the Senate Commerce Committee briefing virtually, have been talking once or twice most days.<br/>
The group representing major US airlines on Wednesday urged the Biden administration to take swift action to address a long-standing air traffic controller shortage and out-of-date facilities and technology. Airlines for America CEO Nick Calio said "more urgency" is required to address the shortage in air traffic controllers that has resulted in airlines cutting flights in key markets like New York. "Business as usual isn't cutting it," Calio said in a speech. "It is an urgent problem. It's easy to ignore maybe on a day to day basis, but we have to come up with a plan to address it." The FAA is still about 3,000 controllers behind staffing targets and has 10,700 certified controllers, up slightly from 10,578 in 2022, which was virtually the same as in 2021 and down 10% from 2012. Calio, whose group includes American Airlines, Delta, United Airlines and Southwest called for a dashboard measuring government progress on aviation initiatives - similar to what the US DOT has posted on airlines customer service commitments. USDOT did not immediately comment. In September, the FAA extended cuts to minimum flight requirements at congested New York City-area airports through October 2024, citing significant staffing shortages. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has said New York air traffic staffing is "unacceptable." An independent review team in November called for "urgent action" to bolster the FAA after a series of close calls involving passenger jets. The report said the FAA's outdated communications system can no longer get spare parts for many systems and many aging FAA air traffic control facilities have leaking roofs, broken heating and air conditioning systems and old surveillance radar systems that must soon be replaced at a cost of billions of dollars.<br/>
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was unable to fly home from Davos as scheduled on Wednesday due to a critical malfunction with his aircraft. After flying from Davos to Zurich on helicopters and boarding the modified Boeing Co. 737, Blinken and his party were informed that the aircraft had been deemed unsafe to fly. An oxygen leak detected previously could not be remedied. A smaller jet was being flown from Brussels to ferry the top US diplomat home, while many of his aides and members of the press pool had to travel to Washington commercially. While faults are not uncommon on aircraft, the glitch comes at a difficult time for Boeing. The company has had many of its 737 Max 9 aircraft grounded by regulators following an accident on an Alaska Airlines jet on Jan 5. The jet being used by Blinken is an older variant of the 737, and is designated as the C40 by the US Air Force.<br/>
Heavy snow and freezing rain grounded hundreds of flights in Germany on Wednesday, including at Frankfurt Airport, one of Europe’s busiest, where no flights were taking off at midday as a blast of Arctic air made its way across the continent. About 700 of the 1,030 scheduled departures at Frankfort were canceled because of the weather on Wednesday, said Dieter Hulick, an airport spokesman. The airport had expected about 115,000 passengers on Wednesday. The weather-related disruptions would continue on Thursday, the airport said, advising passengers to check their flight status and not travel to the airport if their flight was canceled. “What we have now for a couple of hours is ice-rain, which is causing surfaces to build layers of ice that has caused our de-icing people to have stopped de-icing,” Hulick said. “We have no takeoffs.” Later, after the “intensity of freezing rain” had eased, Hulick said, departures resumed in the early evening. In Norway, Oslo Airport was closed early in the day because of heavy snow, an airport spokeswoman said. The airport had reopened by midafternoon. Northern Europe has been swept by icy temperatures this week. Bad weather resulted in more than 100 school closures and delays in Britain. And a plane bound for Amsterdam slid off the runway at Gothenburg Landvetter Airport in Sweden in a blizzard on Wednesday. No significant injuries were reported. Germany’s weather service issued a black ice warning for much of the southern half of the country for Wednesday and Thursday because of snowfall, freezing rain and low temperatures. A heavy snow warning was in effect in some central regions. The flight cancellations spread across Germany on Wednesday. Airlines canceled hundreds of flights to and from Munich Airport on Wednesday morning, about a third of total flights, the airport said in a statement. The airport shut down last month because of excessive snowfall. Saarbrücken Airport, a small international airport on the country’s western border, suspended operations entirely on Wednesday, its website said.<br/>
Oslo's main airport closed for safety reasons on Wednesday due to heavy snowfall in Norway's capital region and many train services and other public transport also faced severe delays or cancellations, operators said. The Oslo airport said it will remain shut at least until 1330 GMT but the outage could also be extended. "This is extremely rare... there is so much snow that the pilots can't see the lights on the ground so we've halted all incoming and outgoing flights," said a spokesperson for Norway's national airport operator Avinor. "Safety comes first, the spokesperson added. Avinor said it asked passengers to monitor information from their airlines for additional information.<br/>
Russia has allocated an additional 107.7b roubles ($1.23b) from its rainy day fund to a state company that has been purchasing aircraft from foreign lessors, the finance ministry said on Wednesday.<br/>The ministry said it had purchased bonds of NLK-Finance, a subsidiary of state-owned insurance company NSK, bringing the total amount spent on NLK-Finance bonds to 296.8b roubles ($3.38b). After the West imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow re-registered aircraft leased from Western companies and then started negotiations to buy them out. Most of the planes were manufactured by Boeing and Airbus. Russia has already settled insurance claims with Western lessors including AerCap for over 100 planes, using money from the rainy day fund and transferring ownership of the planes to NSK.<br/>
Indian airlines and plane makers Boeing and Airbus will reveal new orders this week and showcase large jets as they look to cash in on a boom in a fast-growing aviation market with a greater focus on international routes. As India sets its sights on becoming a regional aviation hub to rival Dubai and Singapore, the Wings India event in its southern city of Hyderabad, running from Thursday to Sunday, is set to draw representatives of lessors and government as well. "Air traffic, airports and fleet size are going to grow at a double digit growth annually in years to come," the civil aviation minister, Jyotiraditya Scindia, told Reuters last week in response to a question on industry growth. Although India is now the world's fastest-growing aviation market, with travel demand outstripping the supply of planes, the bulk of international traffic is captured by global carriers such as Emirates. India's newest airline Akasa, due to start international flights in 2024, is expected to announce an order for about 150 Boeing 737 MAX narrowbody planes at this week's aviation show, adding to recent record orders by bigger rivals. It was not immediately clear if Akasa's order included Boeing's controversial 737 Max 9 planes, after a cabin panel blowout this month put the planemaker in regulators' crosshairs, adding to its safety crises. Indian commercial airlines do not currently operate the 737 Max 9 aircraft. The activity comes despite the financial struggles of two budget carriers GoFirst and SpiceJet, in the wake of the collapse of two other Indian airlines since 2011. However, bankruptcies were a "thing of the past" and the growth of smaller regional airlines and government incentives to carriers to fly to smaller towns has sparked an industry boom, Scindia added.<br/>
Airbus cemented its position last week as the world’s biggest plane maker for the fifth straight year, announcing that it had delivered more aircraft and secured more orders than Boeing in 2023. At the same time, Boeing was trying to put out a huge public-relations and safety crisis caused by a harrowing near disaster involving its 737 Max line of airliners. In the long-running duel between the two aviation rivals, Airbus has pulled far ahead. “What used to be a duopoly has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing,” said Richard Aboulafia, the managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory in Washington, D.C. “A lot of people, whether investors, financiers or customers, are looking at Airbus and seeing a company run by competent people,” he said. “The contrast with Boeing is fairly profound.” The incident involving the 737 Max 9, in which a hole blew open in the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines flight in midair, was the latest in a string of safety lapses in Boeing’s workhorse aircraft — including two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 — that are indirectly helping propel the fortunes of the European aerospace giant. As the FAA widens its scrutiny of Max 9 production, Airbus’s edge is likely to sharpen. Airlines are embarking on massive expansions of their fleets to meet a postpandemic surge in the demand for global air travel, and are considering which company to turn to. Shares in Airbus, a consortium with factories and offices in several European countries, soared to a record Friday after its CE, Guillaume Faury, said the company had won 2,094 orders for new aircraft in 2023, the most in a single year. That includes the popular single-aisle A320neo planes, its main competitor to the 737 Max. Boeing also reported more aircraft deliveries and orders in 2023 than it had the year before, but at a pace slower than Airbus’s. The two companies together manufacture the vast majority of the world’s commercial jets.<br/>
More manufacturers are seeking to fly their products in the next few weeks as attacks on Red Sea shipping force them to find alternate routes, logistics firms say, a potential boon for a sector dealing with muted post-pandemic demand and overcapacity. The Red Sea, which leads to the Suez canal, lies on the key east-west trade route from Asia's manufacturing hubs to Europe and onto the east coast of the Americas. About 12% of world shipping traffic accesses the Suez Canal via its waters. But more than two months of attacks by Yemen's Houthi militia on ships in the region have affected companies and alarmed major powers in an escalation of Israel's war with Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza. While air freight prices have so far remained relatively stable as the shipping crisis coincides with a seasonal lull in demand, data from freight booker Freightos showed rates on a China-to-Europe route had surged 91% week-on-week on Sunday. Price reporting agency TAC Index also said there were signs of an uptick in China-to-Europe air freight rates this week. "We are talking to many customers already about increased air capacity," said Yngve Ruud, head of Air Logistics at global logistics firm Kühne+Nagel. "We have probably 20-30% more discussions and proposals than usual in January."<br/>