United Postpones Start of Faro, Cebu Due to FAA Restrictions

Jun 20, 2024 03:15

Rumors had been swirling, but on March 22, United’s VP of Corporate Safety Sasha Johnson put out an internal memo explaining that the airline would be under increased scrutiny from the FAA due to a string of non-life threatening but highly-publicized incidents. The wording was vague regarding what that meant in concrete terms, but now we know one thing as confirmed with the airline. It can’t open new cities, and both Newark – Faro and Tokyo – Cebu will not fly this summer.

The list of incidents coming out of United was long but not particularly noteworthy. According to The Aviation Herald (I added the March 7 incident from other sources), here is a list of what’s happened between the beginning of the year and March 22 that could possibly be blamed on United. (I left out lightning strikes, bird strikes, etc.)

January 6, 2024 – A 757-200 lost cabin pressure flying Newark – Denver, so it diverted to Chicago January 10, 2024 – An A319 had a door-open indicator (which doesn’t appear to have been real) after departing Sarasota, so it diverted to Tampa January 24, 2024 – An A321neo had an engine failure flying from Chicago to Las Vegas, so it returned to Chicago January 28, 2024 – A 737-800 had a windshield crack while flying from Vegas to Dulles, so it diverted to Denver January 31, 2024 – A 737-800 had an engine failure flying from Charlotte to Houston, so it diverted to Atlanta February 1, 2024 – A 777-200 had a smoke warning when approaching Hong Kong on a flight from San Francisco, it landed safely but when they had to ferry it back for maintenance, an engine failure forced them to abort takeoff February 6, 2024 – A 737-8 MAX from Nassau reportedly lost use of rudder upon landing in Newark, a further investigation shows that it may be a problem with “cold soaking” of the rollout guidance servo February 16, 2024 – A 737-800 from Kahului to San Francisco lost cabin pressure, so it diverted to Honolulu February 17, 2024 – A 767-400 from Washington/Dulles to Honolulu had its tail strike the runway on departure, so it returned to Dulles February 19, 2024 – A 757-200 from San Francisco to Boston had a piece of the slats on the right side break off, so it diverted to Denver February 20, 2024 – A 737-800 from Colorado Springs to Denver had a tire burst upon departure, and it landed in Denver March 4, 2024 – A 737-900 from Houston to Fort Myers had an engine stall on climb-out, so it returned to Houston March 4, 2024 – A 757-300 from Honolulu to San Francisco had to shut down an engine, and it landed safely in San Francisco March 7, 2024 – A 777-200 from San Francisco to Osaka had a tire fall off after departure, so it diverted to Los Angeles March 8, 2024 – An A320 from San Francisco to Mexico City had one of its three hydraulic systems fail, so it diverted to Los Angeles March 9, 2024 – An A320 from Chicago to Salt Lake City had an oil warning come on, so it returned to Chicago March 11, 2024 – A 777-300ER from Sydney to San Francisco had a hydraulic leak from the gear on climbout, so it returned to Sydney March 14, 2024 – An A320 from Dallas/Fort Worth to San Francisco had a hydraulic leak, and it landed safely in San Francisco March 17, 2024 – A 737-800 from New York/LaGuardia to Chicago had an air data indication issue (meaning conflicting or incorrect data), and it landed safely in Chicago March 18, 2024 – A 767-300ER from Newark to London had a gear issue, so it returned to Newark

If you are a casual traveler, this list probably looks absolutely terrifying. But if you work on or around airplanes, you know that this stuff is mostly pretty routine. Hydraulic leaks, cracked windshields, warning lights… these happen all the time and aren’t particularly concerning in small numbers. And yes, these are small numbers.

Think about it this way. United had 335,114 departures scheduled between January 1 and March 22… and 20 of those flights had problems. That is 0.006 percent.

This is also not just isolated to United. The Aviation Herald shows Delta with 13 and American with 14 during the same time period. Heck, just yesterday Southwest had an engine cowling fly off.

Certainly United’s issues have been in the news more than the others. Some of that is due to the optics of it all. The video of the tire flying off the 777? That’s news gold right there. The broken slat on the United 757? Yup, someone onboard had a great video that got shared everywhere. While I haven’t seen it confirmed, I’ve seen it suggested this could have happened from a bird strike on takeoff. It’s unlikely the thing broke because of United’s maintenance.

Oh and that one rudder issue on the MAX? It sounds like it might be a defect pending further investigation, but it doesn’t matter, because… MAX!

With the news covering all of this in great detail, the FAA must have decided that it had to look like it was taking important action. So it did. According to that internal memo from United, the FAA agreed with United that the airline needed to “take an even closer look at multiple areas of our operation to ensure we are doing all we can to promote and drive safety compliance.”

The most important thing that United mentioned in that memo was this:

As part of this effort, the FAA will also pause a variety of certification activities for a period of time. Those activities will differ depending on the work group and we will learn more from the FAA about that soon.

This was somewhat vague at the time, and we didn’t know what the impact would be. It sounds like United didn’t know either.

But on Friday night, United canceled its new planned service from Newark to Faro this summer, but it does expect it to fly in summer 2025. The airline also delayed the start of the new Tokyo/Narita – Cebu flight from August until the end of the IATA summer season in late October.

Apparently, one of those now-paused certification activities is the ability to open up a new station. I imagine this might go deeper than that, but the details just aren’t entirely clear at this point. I did ask the FAA for comment as well, but they simply referred me back to United.

This seems like a very strange move by the FAA, but without more information, I assume it points back to United’s ops leadership team failing to take care of that relationship. If you’re open and transparent, the FAA tends to be a lot easier to work with. Then again, it could also be that the FAA just needed a scapegoat to show it was doing its job after its reputation took a beating during the MAX debacle. But even if that were the case, the FAA is going to make an example out of the most difficult airline it deals with. At least some of the blame has to lie on United’s ops leaders.

Opening a new station is not a heavy lift for United, and it is highly unlikely that this will somehow refocus the company. If the FAA was truly concerned about safety, you’d think it would do something more immediate and drastic. Instead, it can just do a couple of higher profile moves like this to show that it is paying attention.

Now the real question is… how long is this going to go on? We don’t know, and I don’t think United does either. In the memo, we get a hint where United says “Over the next several weeks, we will begin to see more of an FAA presence in our operation….” I asked United if they’d had any more info since the memo was sent, but they said they had “no additional details” to share.

We still don’t know how long it’ll take to complete the process, which is presumably when United will be able to resume flying to new places again. I would imagine that delaying Cebu until late October is what United considers to be a conservative move so it doesn’t have to inconvenience more people, but as we’ve learned time and time again, the government operates on its own timeline.

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United Postpones Start of Faro, Cebu Due to FAA Restrictions