Airlines are carrying out inspections on Boeing 737 jets in the wake of the Southwest Airlines engine explosion which killed one passenger.
United Airlines said it is inspecting more than 300 planes in its Boeing 737 fleet that are fitted with CFM engines. The inspection was sparked not by this week’s accident but a recent service bulletin that came out of a similar engine failure dating back to 2016.
That engine failure was also on a Southwest plane, and National Transportation Safety Board investigators now say the two incidents are linked by broken fan blades.
Southwest said it is fast-tracking inspections of all CFM engines, which it expects to complete within 30 days.
Korean Air Lines said it will pro-actively carry out inspections across its 737 fleet and Japan Airlines said two 737 jets in its fleet had developed fan blade problems and would be rectified.
Dubai-based budget carrier flydubai said it had already implemented an upcoming European directive requiring inspections by early next year after European regulators studied the findings from the 2016 incident.
The US Federal Aviation Administration says it takes about two hours to fully inspect a jet’s two engines.
Most newer Boeing 737s are fitted with engines from CFM, amounting to thousands of aircraft globally.
They are developed by a joint venture made up of General Electric and France’s Safran, and the engines have a good safety record.
