United Airlines announced that it plans to restart operations of temporarily suspended Boeing 777-200 aircraft equipped with Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines “in the near future”.
“We look forward to getting that aircraft back to safe operations in the future,” United Chief Operations Officer Jon Roitman said in an earnings call with investors on April 20, 2021.
United temporarily grounded its 52 Boeing 777-200 aircraft with Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines in February 2021 after an United Airlines Boeing 777-200, operating flight UAL328 from Denver, United States to Honolulu, Hawaii, US, suffered an uncontained engine failure, scattering engine parts over several neighborhoods around Denver.
After the incident occurred, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an emergency airworthiness directive (AD) requiring owners and operators of the Pratt & Whitney PW4000-112 engines powering the Boeing 777 to immediately perform a thermal acoustic image inspection before any further flight.
In an earnings call with investors, United added that there had been “productive collaboration with Pratt, Boeing and the FAA” regarding the Pratt-powered Boeing 777-200 aircraft fixes.