general

Microsoft criticized Delta Air Lines on Tuesday for overstating the technology company’s role in a costly disruption that led the airline to cancel thousands of flights last month. In a letter between lawyers representing the two companies, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Microsoft said Delta had sought to deflect from its own shortcomings by blaming the technology giant for its problems. Delta’s comments, both publicly and in legal correspondence, are “incomplete, false, misleading and damaging,” Microsoft said in the letter, which was addressed to David Boies, a prominent lawyer whose firm is representing Delta. “The truth is very different from the false picture you and Delta have sought to paint,” wrote Mark Cheffo, a partner at the Dechert law firm who is representing Microsoft. In mid-July, a cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, issued a flawed software update to customers who run Microsoft Windows, effectively shutting down various computer systems of lots of businesses, including several airlines. Most carriers bounced back relatively quickly, but Delta struggled for days, ultimately canceling about 5,000 flights over four days, or more than a third of its schedule. Delta’s CE, Ed Bastian, has said the episode had cost the airline about $500m. Last week, he told employees that he had hired Boies’s firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, to pursue legal claims against Microsoft and CrowdStrike, which also rebutted Delta’s claims this week. In its letter on Tuesday, Cheffo said that Microsoft “empathizes” with Delta and its customers and that while the technology company was not at fault, it had offered to help the airline for no charge after the outage. Microsoft repeated that offer over five days, from July 19 to July 23, but was turned down each time, it said.<br/>

Boeing Co.’s aircraft delivery delays are affecting passenger growth projections at Frankfurt airport because the main airline at the hub, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, isn’t getting the aircraft it had planned for this year. Passengers numbers are set to come in at the lower end of a range of 61m to 65m travelers this year, the airport operator said in a statement on Tuesday as it reported earnings. Growth also slowed sequentially this year, with passenger numbers up 4.5% in the second quarter, compared with a 10.4% increase in the first three months, the company said. Lufthansa is the biggest carrier at Germany’s largest hub, meaning that any issues at the airline feed through to the airport. Lufthansa said last week that it won’t get any new Boeing 787 Dreamliners this year. Some of its Airbus SE aircraft also require extra maintenance on engines, affecting growth plans. Fraport CEO Stefan Schulte said high costs imposed by German regulators have also constrained growth. While Boeing has curbed production to improve manufacturing quality, Airbus has cut its annual delivery target because of a shortage of parts. Those setbacks have left some airlines unable to grow as quickly as they had planned.<br/>

A Boeing safety executive told a federal safety hearing on Tuesday that the company is working on design changes to avoid a repeat of the near catastrophic blowout of a door plug from a practically new 737 Max 9 at the start of the year. The NTSB — the body in charge of aviation accident investigations in the U.S. — released more than 3,000 pages of documents ahead its full two-day hearing about Flight 1282, including interviews with employees at Boeing and its beleaguered fuselage maker Spirit AeroSystems, some of which pointed to rework. “I just want a word of caution here, this is not a PR campaign for Boeing,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said. “This is an investigation on what happened on Jan. 5. Understand?” Bolts that were meant to hold the door in place weren’t attached, according to preliminary investigation results. While there were no serious injuries, the accident put the spotlight back on Boeing’s safety procedures and a series of manufacturing flaws that required changes at the company’s factories, including what led up to the door plug getting removed, but not secured last year. “They are working on some design changes that will allow the door, the plug, to not be closed if there is any issue, until it is firmly secure,” said Elizabeth Lund, who heads safety for Boeing’s commercial airplane unit. The changes would be implemented within the year, Lund said.<br/>

Boeing said on Tuesday it plans to make design changes to prevent a future mid-air cabin panel blowout like the one in an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 flight in January that spun the planemaker into its second major crisis in recent years. The National Transportation Safety Board and Boeing said officials still have not determined who removed and reinstalled that plane's door plug during production. NTSB completed the first of two days of hearings Tuesday that lasted nearly 10 hours into the mid-air emergency that badly damaged Boeing's reputation, led to the MAX 9 grounding for two weeks, a ban by the Federal Aviation Administration on expanding production, a criminal investigation and the departure of several key executives.<br/>Investigators have said the door plug in the new Alaska MAX 9 was missing four key bolts. Boeing, which has vowed to make key quality improvement, faced extensive questions about the production of the accident MAX 9 and lack of paperwork documenting the removal of the door plug. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy on Tuesday criticized the planemaker's safety culture, asking why it had not made improvements earlier and said it must takes steps to improve. "The safety culture needs a lot of work," Homendy said. Boeing's senior vice president for quality Elizabeth Lund said the planemaker is working on design changes that it hopes to implement within the year and then to retrofit across the fleet.<br/>

Workers on the Boeing 737 Max that lost a door plug on a January flight told federal safety investigators that they felt pressure to do their jobs too fast to avoid mistakes, according to testimony released Tuesday at the start of a two-day investigative hearing. The revelation came at the start of the hearing by the National Transportation Safety Board into the blowout, with investigators questioning Boeing personnel about safety issues at the planemaker and what that might mean for passengers on its ubiquitous planes. Previously, the NTSB said the door plug ripped off in mid-flight because the plane left a Boeing factory without the four bolts needed to keep the door plug in place. Many of those documents were transcripts of interviews conducted by NTSB investigators during the seven months since the accident. One of those interviewed, identified only as “Assembler Installer Doors B,” told the investigator that the workload at the Boeing factory was too great to avoid mistakes from being made. “As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” said the unidentified Boeing worker. “That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot.” One transcript showed that a Boeing employee, identified as a Door Master Lead, told investigators there planes required much of the work during the assembly process to be redone because of problems that are discovered, as happened with the door plug that was removed to fix some rivets. The worker said there was no special training to open, close, or remove a door plug versus a regular door.<br/>

Cockpit crew representatives have asked Airbus’s leadership to reconsider its exploration of single-pilot operations, citing the recent IT-related air transport disruption as illustrating the risks of over-reliance on technology. Three pilot associations – the US ALPA International, Europe’s ECA, and international federation IFALPA – have written to Airbus chief Guillaume Faury, highlighting the mid-July “technology meltdown” which resulted from a failed software roll-out by US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “Fortunately, the safety and security of aircraft operations were not impacted,” the 5 August letter states. “But the lesson here is the certain fallibility of technology and the necessity to consider technology as an assist to human professionals and monitored airline operations rather than replacement.” The potential for reducing the number of pilots in the cockpit is the subject of research into initial concepts, among them extended minimum-crew operations, known as ‘eMCO’. Under eMCO the flight duration is prolonged by allowing one pilot in a two-person crew to rest, leaving the other pilot in the cockpit during low-activity cruise.<br/>

Brazilian planemaker Embraer signed a five-year $1b syndicated credit agreement, the firm said on Tuesday. The agreement is an extension of a $650m line signed off on in October 2022, Embraer said in a statement.<br/>

A flight to Bali was delayed for around two hours after an X-ray machine caught fire at Changi Airport Terminal 1 on Aug 6. A video posted on TikTok on Aug 6 shows thick black smoke billowing from the machine in Gate D46, as people stood watching from a distance. Scoot’s TR280 flight is displayed on a nearby screen. The flight is bound for Bali and scheduled to take off at 7.10am. The video, posted by user Montana & Chris, later shows smoke filling part of the departure hall as passengers cover their noses with their clothing. Real estate developer Chris Hanne, who was travelling with his partner, told The Straits Times that the incident happened at around 6.30am. “People had to clear out of the area because it was getting really hard to breathe,” said the 30-year-old. “The smoke travelled at least 75m in both directions of the terminal.” He added: “It was pretty unbearable and lots of people were coughing, trying to make it through the smoke.” <br/>