Japan Airlines announced that it has retired its Boeing 777 airplanes equipped with Pratt & Whitney engines a year early after two mid-air engine failures.
The airline said in a statement issued Sunday that it has operated Boeing 777 planes with Pratt engines for nearly 25 years, after taking its first delivery in 1996. The plan had been to retire the planes in March 2022, but the airline said it moved that up a year as there were no plans to resume using the planes.
The planes had been grounded after two engine failures — one that took place Dec. 4 on a Japan Airlines flight from Okinawa to Tokyo and the second Feb. 20 on a United Airlines plane. In the latter, debris rained on a Denver neighborhood and flying metal punched a hole in the airplane’s fuselage, raising concerns that the outcome could have been more serious.
The airline said in a statement that it would continue to cooperate with the investigation of the December incident by the Japan Transport Safety Board.
Japan Airlines said it would use aircraft from international flights on domestic routes so it could maintain the frequency of flights.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in February ordered all airplanes using the class of Pratt & Whitney engine implicated in the United Airlines engine explosion grounded until new inspections are carried out.
No plans have been announced to resume flights. United is the only American carrier that uses the Pratt-made PW4000 engines to power its Boeing 777 fleet.
In an emergency airworthiness directive, the FAA said PW4000 power plants must be scanned using thermal acoustic imaging technology to check for weaknesses in the engine’s titanium low-pressure compressor blades. Investigators believe the failure of one such blade triggered United’s in-flight emergency.
The fractured fan blade was flown on a private jet to Pratt & Whitney’s headquarters in East Hartford to be examined under the supervision of National Transportation Safety Board investigators.
Fan blades from the engines that fall under the FAA order were to be shipped to Pratt & Whitney for testing, Boeing said in a statement. About 125 Boeing 777 aircraft are powered by the PW4000-112 engine covered under the directive.
If the failure was due to metal fatigue, that could point to a recurring technical problem for Pratt engines.
