American Airlines Says It’s Fixed All Those Pesky Loose Seats, Doesn’t Say How Many There Were

The good news: American Airlines says it’s all done inspecting its 48 planes and fixing whichever seats happened to be loose. The kind of “hmm…” news? It didn’t say exactly how many planes were in need of attention, just that all those that did are now back in service.

The Associated Press cites a spokeswoman who said engineers were still determining how many planes needed repairs. It had said earlier that so far six planes were found with slidey seats.

We aren’t airplane maintenance experts, but if you have a certain amount of planes and know for a fact that all repairs were made, wouldn’t there be a pretty easy tally of like, “Hey, we fixed seats on [insert amount that is either all 48 or some number less than that]”? Perhaps we’re wrong, but in the interest of full disclosure, it would be nice to know how widespread the problem was.

American says it’s going to be totally cooperative with federal aviation regulators to get down to the bottom of what it was about their installation process that caused seats on three flights to become unbolted recently. The planes that had problems were Boeing 757s that had recently had a facelift inside, which included seat removal and reinstallation.

Earlier this week, American blamed the problems on a device called a saddle clamp, which is supposed to secure the seats to the floor. Whether the clamps were defective or just improperly used is unclear.

American Airlines finishes loose-seat inspections [Associated Press]

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