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Regional Airline ASA Grounds 60 Jets

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Eagle757shark

Well-known member
Joined
Jul 31, 2006
Posts
575
Regional airline ASA grounds 60 jets

By MIKE MORRIS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Delta Connection carrier Atlantic Southeast Airlines has grounded 60 jets — or 40 percent of its fleet — for engine safety inspections.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many Wednesday flights will be canceled, but a spokeswoman said some planes could be grounded until late Thursday or Friday.
ASA is one of Atlanta-based Delta’s biggest contract carriers and has 396 daily departures from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Delta books passengers on the flights and numbers the flights as its own.
ASA spokeswoman Kate Modolo said an internal audit revealed concerns about whether the planes’ engines had been inspected according to the engine manufacturer’s recommendations.
The company self-reported the problem to the Federal Aviation Administration and voluntarily grounded the planes late Tuesday “as a precautionary measure” so they could be re-inspected, Modolo said.
“We’re working to complete engine re-inspections on all of those aircraft within the next 36 to 42 hours,” Modolo said just before daybreak Wednesday.
“Safety is our number one priority, and we apologize for the inconvenience this has been causing the passengers,” Modolo said. She said customers are being contacted by the Delta reservations office “and are being re-accommodated on next available flights.”
The Federal Aviation Administration sometimes orders inspections of commercial aircraft when maintenance issues arise, but mass groundings are unusual. Modolo said she did not recall such a grounding in the past at ASA.
Only 50-seat Bombardier CRJ200 jets were affected. ASA has a total of 150 planes, according to its Web site. They include 110 50-seat CRJ200s, 38 70-seat CRJ700s and two 90-seat CRJ900s.
ASA is based in Atlanta but is now owned by Utah-based SkyWest Inc.
The carrier started as an independent airline in 1979 and became a Delta contract partner in 1984. Delta bought full control of ASA in 1999 but sold it to SkyWest six years later during a financial crisis.
 
Since the other thread is making this out to be a rumor or a hoax. I thought I would post the actual story from the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
 
No DAL does work for ASA on a contract basis for their engines. My question was the reporting error at Tech Ops or at your hanger.
Basically do your Mechanics to this work or does our Engine shop do the work?
 
No DAL does work for ASA on a contract basis for their engines. My question was the reporting error at Tech Ops or at your hanger.
Basically do your Mechanics to this work or does our Engine shop do the work?
Is your computer typing the word "to" on its own, or are you not reading what you write?
 
No DAL does work for ASA on a contract basis for their engines. My question was the reporting error at Tech Ops or at your hanger.
Basically do your Mechanics to this work or does our Engine shop do the work?



I believe that this will be a question that the lawyers will be sorting out over the next few weeks.

Not to throw stones here, but it would not be out of the realm of the believable to discover that this was yet another cost cutting move at the expense of the regional 'partners' gone bad. This could simply be a case of not enough resources being allocated to accomplish the task of the contracted engine maintenance. (Also, as we all know, the work is never truly done until it is signed off.) Other examples of this would be the recent decrease in number of rampers working DCI flights at KATL, thus negatively affecting D0 and A14 numbers, the raw schedules given to ASA's scheduling department lately, the removal of ASA personel from outstations; the list goes on.

The ultimate question that needs to be answered, which publicly can not in todays legal environment, is whether or not the work was actually done. If it was a matter of the work actually being done, but simply accounted for, that's one thing. If it turns out that the required work was simply not done, that's something else all together. This statement is regardless of whether Delta or ASA maintenance did the work.
 

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