More passengers 'avoiding MAX 9 jets' - Kayak

MICE News
Thursday, 25 January 2024

On-line travel agent Kayak says that since a new Alaska Airlines B737 MAX 9 lost a piece of its fuselage earlier this month, it has registered a surge of flier interest in avoiding that type of jet.


Kayak introduced a filter allowing fliers to add or exclude specific models of plane back in 2019, but the company says it wasn't really used much until the Alaska Airlines incident, when there was a 15-fold increase in the filter's use, prompting it to rework the setting, making it more prominent on the search page and adding the ability to distinguish between 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 planes, because only the latter has been grounded by America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

As well as temporarily grounding the MAX 9 fleet, the FAA has now expanded its scrutiny of Boeing jets to another, older model of B737, the 737-900ER, which uses a similar design as the Alaska Air MAX 9 jet. 

The FAA this week said inspections of an initial group of 40 MAX 9 jets had been completed, a key hurdle to eventually ungrounding the model. 

The FAA will review data from those inspections before deciding when the planes can resume flights.

More passengers 'avoiding MAX 9 jets' - Kayak

MICE News
Thursday, 25 January 2024

On-line travel agent Kayak says that since a new Alaska Airlines B737 MAX 9 lost a piece of its fuselage earlier this month, it has registered a surge of flier interest in avoiding that type of jet.


Kayak introduced a filter allowing fliers to add or exclude specific models of plane back in 2019, but the company says it wasn't really used much until the Alaska Airlines incident, when there was a 15-fold increase in the filter's use, prompting it to rework the setting, making it more prominent on the search page and adding the ability to distinguish between 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 planes, because only the latter has been grounded by America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

As well as temporarily grounding the MAX 9 fleet, the FAA has now expanded its scrutiny of Boeing jets to another, older model of B737, the 737-900ER, which uses a similar design as the Alaska Air MAX 9 jet. 

The FAA this week said inspections of an initial group of 40 MAX 9 jets had been completed, a key hurdle to eventually ungrounding the model. 

The FAA will review data from those inspections before deciding when the planes can resume flights.