Mysterious flight cancellations are on the rise: What’s going on with Switzerland’s Boeing 777s?

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Six long-haul flights have been canceled in the last five days. This probably never happened this way in Switzerland.

Aviation fan Peter Hagenbuch (46) from Lucerne noticed: On February 20, a Boeing 777 stopped in Hong Kong. The flight from Zurich to São Paulo (Brazil) will be canceled on 21 February, the flight to San Francisco (USA) the next day and the flight from Zurich to Johannesburg (South Africa) between 21 and 25 February will be canceled. All canceled flights would be on a 777, but it would not always be the same flight.

Swiss has a total of twelve aircraft of this type, which joined its fleet in January 2016. So far the “Triple Seven” has established a solid reputation as the Swiss “workhorse” on long-distance routes. What’s up?

Various technical problems

At Blick’s request, the Swiss press office reported “operational irregularities” that led to “an unusually high number of flight plan changes.” The reason for this was various technical problems.

In one case, the aircraft was subject to regular A-checks, that is, maintenance performed routinely after 200-300 flights. “Due to the structural damage, standard repairs were not possible, so we had to extend ground time and postpone the planned flight,” Swiss said. The aircraft in Hong Kong is expected to undergo D-check, or “major maintenance”, and is expected to return to Zurich at the end of March.

In another case, the cancellation was caused by air conditioning failure. “Unfortunately, we had to cancel another flight as the delivery of spare parts took longer,” Swiss said.

Switzerland also discovered small leaks in the windshields in the cockpit of another aircraft, so these had to be removed and replaced.

In another case, Switzerland had to replace an engine’s starter. Due to delivery time, the flight was postponed to the next day.

Cancellations are likely to be expensive

According to Swiss, this is an “extraordinary accumulation of individual cases over a short period of time” on 777 aircraft. Swiss continued: “We deeply regret the inconvenience we caused to our passengers.”

Repeated cancellations probably cost Switzerland a lot of money. But there is no need to worry: the Boeing 777-300ERs used by Switzerland have a very low incident and accident rate relative to the number of flights and years of operation.

Source :Blick