At the end of October, I asked whether Bombardier and SAS should kiss and make up over their differences. Yeah, sure there were three Q400 landing gear issues in two months, but what’s a little malfunction between friends?

Fortunately, that’s all water under the bridge now, and the two sides did come together to hash out a reconciliation. What’s the plan? Bombardier will fork over 1 billion Swedish kronor. That’s only about $164m today, but just wait a week or two and I’m sure that’ll rise to, oh , maybe $300 or $400m.

But wait, there’s more.

As part of the deal, SAS has to buy 27 new planes from Bombardier. Thirteen of those are CRJ-900 jets and fourteen are . . . Q400 NextGen birds. Whaaaaaaaat?!?

Oh yeah, they’re going back to the well. Presumably the title “NextGen” can be interpreted as “LandingGearNowWorks.” But I’d like to quote CEO Mats Jansson here from back in October. “Confidence in the Q400 has diminished considerably and our customers are becoming increasingly doubtful about flying in this type of aircraft.”

Uh oh.

So, they took a huge hit by grounding the entire fleet and saying it wasn’t safe. Now they’re going back to flying the aircraft. Even if everything is fixed up, this still is not going to be an easy marketing sell for the airline to the locals. I bet they’re wishing they hadn’t bad-mouthed it so much back then.

Judging from comments on previous posts in the last couple of days, I’m guessing many of you have already heard that SAS had yet another Q400 turboprop land with gear problems. This makes for an unbelievable third gear problem resulting in an emergency landing in less than two months. If you’d like to see the rather boring video of this landing, click here.

Before anyone had time to figure out what happened, SAS came out saying that they were permanently grounding the plane type and selling their fleet of 27 as soon as possible. That would certainly imply that SAS blames Bombardier, the manufacturer of the plane, for this. But is it their fault?

I’m not really convinced of that. There are many other operators of the Dash 8 in the world, including Horizon Air here in the US. They operate in the Pacific Northwest in a damp, cool climate not unlike that of Scandinavia. Their fleet is also about the same age as that of SAS with most aircraft being delivered in 2001. So why hasn’t Horizon had a single problem thus far?

Bombardier’s Marc Duchesne did say, “We did an internal investigation that confirmed there was no systemic problem with the landing gear of the Q400.” That would certainly point to something going on with the aircraft’s operation specific to SAS, but of course we just don’t know yet. Bombardier has also said that this problem was unrelated to the previous gear problems.

So, should SAS be grounding these planes and selling them off? It’s not an easy decision, but I would argue that it’s too early to make that kind of decision. They’re estimating this will cost the airline anywhere from $47m to $62m. (Actually 300m to 400m Swedish Krona.) That’s a lot of money considering they don’t even know what the problem is yet.

I think back to the DC-10, an airplane that had more than its share of serious problems. Unlike the Q400, its problems actually caused many fatalities, and it was ultimately grounded by the US for a short time until problems were fixed. That was a situation far more serious than what SAS is dealing with today, yet major operators like United and American did not walk away from the plane and sell their fleets. The planes were fixed and ended up having a good safety record until their retirement in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Of course, it’s easy for SAS to say that this is the third landing gear problem they’ve had and their customers have lost confidence in the aircraft. They have to get rid of it. But what if it really is something that SAS was doing? In that case, getting rid of the planes will only cost them more money without measurably improving public perception. If it is their fault, they’ll take the hit regardless. And what if it is an easily fixable problem? Will it be worth it to ditch the plane entirely? I remain unconvinced.

I completely agree that they should ground the aircraft until they figure out what’s going on and have other airlines do the flying for them in the short run. But selling the planes off right now seems premature. Let’s just hope they figure out what’s going on quickly so that it doesn’t have the opportunity to happen again.

Last week I wrote about SAS’ two accidents involving landing gear problems on the Q400. This story keeps getting stranger.

On Thursday, Horizon Air announced that they had completed inspections of all their Q400s and everything would be back to normal Tuesday, Sep 24. They took ads out in local papers reassuring customers that inspections were completed, but they made no mention of finding anything wrong.

Meanwhile, a report came out this morning saying that SAS found corrosion of the landing gear on 25 of the 27 planes inspected. They were fixing the gear and then they would put everything back into service.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was yet another incident this weekend. Augsburg Airways, which flies regional flights for Lufthansa, had a Q400 land with its nosegear up at Munich over the weekend. The SAS incidents both involved the main gear, but this still has to have many people thinking about the connection, not to mention how this relates to the ANA nosegear problems from March.

I wish I had more answers than questions at this point, but I don’t. What the heck is going on here? Why is it that Horizon would seemingly find no problems (unless they just aren’t telling us) yet SAS would find some on almost every plane? It’s not like they operate in very different climates. I’d argue that the environment is about the same for both operators. Anyone else have any theories?

What a strange week for the Bombardier Q400 and for Scandinavian airline SAS. After having the gear collapse on two separate landings within a couple of days, I think it’s safe to say there’s a problem here.

First, there was the landing in Aalborg, Denmark last Sunday. You can watch the really cool video coverage by clicking below.

That may look worse than it actually was. Everyone got out fine, as they usually do with gear collapses upon landing.

The second one happened yesterday on a flight to Palanga (Lithuania). According to the release from SAS, the flight apparently “experienced technical difficulties” and diverted to Vilnius (also Lithuania). Once again, everyone was fine, but there are really no details here, but I’m told it was again a landing gear collapse.

This makes sense because Bombardier immediately called for inspections on all Q400s with more than 10,000 cycles (1 takeoff and 1 landing count as 1 cycle). SAS decided to ground their entire fleet immediately until inspections could be completed even though not all of them had more than 10,000 cycles.

In the US, I believe this only affects Alaska’s regional airline Horizon Air. These guys canceled about a quarter of their flights yesterday and will do the same today. Make sure you check with them before you go to the airport to find your flight canceled. Other than that, nobody here should be affected. Continental will have Q400 flights from a regional partner starting next year but that’s not an issue now. And Hawai’i’s Island Air recently got rid of their Q400s as they try to survive.

I’m curious to see what this means going forward. If they don’t find any problems on the existing fleet, will they just started requiring inspections as each plane turns 10,000 cycles old? Something tells me that the accident investigations will turn up some common thread. If not, it’ll have just been an amazing coincidence.

There hasn’t been much to talk about in the way of new flights lately, but I’ve gathered some of them here for your reading pleasure . . .

*Allegiant Air continues to expand with its strategy of infrequent flights from both Orlando and Las Vegas to smaller cities throughout the US. This time, it’s twice weekly from Orlando/Sanford to Shreveport (Louisiana) starting Nov 15 and Kinston (North Carolina) on Nov 10. If you’ve heard of Kinston, please let me know. It’s amazing to think it can support flight to Orlando twice a week, but Allegiant has a habit of making these things works.

*Delta ended its daily Indianapolis - Salt Lake flight on September 4. Now you’ll have to fly through Cincinnati or, gasp, Atlanta.

*SAS will launch four times weekly flights between Stockholm and Beijing in Apr 2007

*In the land of obscurity, United will add a second Sunday flight between Denver and Rockford (Illinois). That means there will be two daily flights every day of the week now. I know, try to hold down your enthusiasm.

*Looks like Alitalia will end its flight between Washington/Dulles and Milan after Sep 30.

*Aeromexico will begin flying from Mexico City to Tokyo/Narita (with a stop in Tijuana) sometime in November according to their President. (This link is in Portuguese.)

*Those fun-filled folks at Ryanair are heading to the islands. They’ve asked for permission to fly from London/Luton and Pisa (Italy) to Malta from October 31. They’d also like to start flights from Dublin on Feb 9. Rumor has it they also want to head to the Canary Islands as well.