More Boeing blunders, more Spirit Airlines struggles, and what flyers like the most: Airline news roundup
Plus, a union protest over an airline merger caused chaos for dozens of flights
Boeing received yet another piece of disappointing news in a year when it’s already received a lot of it. Spirit Airlines CEO Ted Christie said the airline industry was a rigged game right after revealing that his company had yet another quarterly loss. Plus, a familiar carrier’s name made its way back to the top of J.D. Power’s customer satisfaction rankings.
Take a moment to catch up on what’s been happening in the world of airlines.
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Boeing was supposed to finally launch the crewed test flight for its long-running CST-100 Starliner project. But it got delayed again.
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Spirit Airlines needs good news to convince Wall Street that it can do well by itself in the wake of its abandoned merger with JetBlue Airways. Unfortunately, its latest earnings report only proves that it can do badly all by itself. The company reported its 10th consecutive quarterly loss, for $160 million, and it’s forecasting another loss next quarter.
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Spirit Airlines CEO Ted Christie is definitely not bitter about how things went down with the JetBlue Airways merger that was halted by the Justice Department before eventually being abandoned.
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The biggest customer for Boeing’s biggest plane is expressing its frustrations with the manufacturer as years-long delays run into production and delivery slowdowns that have come in the wake of an Alaska Airlines door plug blowout.
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The fuselage supplier behind the door plug blowout that plunged Boeing into months of chaos and slowdowns is, like Boeing, struggling to deal with the fallout from the incident.
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J.D. Power has released its annual ranking of airlines as determined by their scores on customer satisfaction surveys. J.D. Power’s annual North America Airline Satisfaction Study includes in its surveys categories for both “first/business class” and “premium economy.” For the first time in three years, Delta Air Lines leads both categories.
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A bad thing happened to another Boeing plane on Thursday. A 737-300 operated by the Senegalese carrier Transair skidded off the runway while ablaze at Blaise Diagne International Airport in Dakar, Senegal. A statement from Senegal’s Ministry of Infrastructure, Land and Air Transport posted on the social media platform X by the Gambian media outlet Kerr Fatou says that 10 people were injured, including the pilot, and were taken to the hospital.
9 / 10
Air India Express has a big mess on its hands. More than 100 of its flight crews called out sick at the same time, throwing its operations into chaos. Bloomberg reports that 85 of the low-cost carrier’s flights were cancelled and 90 flights were affected in all. This is the second day that the disruptions have taken place. Reuters reports that at least 175 flights in total have been cancelled.
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Spirit AeroSystems, the supplier that crafted the Boeing 737 Max 9 fuselage that dropped a door plug mid-flight in January, has received far less scrutiny than its customer in the wake of the incident. But a new whistleblower’s allegations might change that.