Oct. 04--GREENSBORO -- American Airlines said that work done by its maintenance contractors -- including Greensboro's TIMCO -- had nothing to do with some of its seats coming loose during flights in the past week.
The airline said in a statement that the seats' locking mechanism is a contributing cause, "not where the work was performed."
Kip Blakely, TIMCO Aviation Services' vice president of industry and government relations, said in an interview that TIMCO worked on 10 of the 48 Boeing 757 aircraft where the seats were installed.
TIMCO worked on two of the aircraft whose seats came loose, but American worked on the planes after TIMCO did and flew the planes for about a week before the problems.
"Both aircraft we had touched had multiple cycles on them before the seats came out," Blakely said. "It's not like they left TIMCO and fell out. They flew many many cycles for many days."
In the past week, rows of seats have come loose on three separate flights, two of which made emergency landings.
TIMCO had attached seats on one of those planes that had to make an emergency landing.
Blakely said the plane left TIMCO's maintenance center at Piedmont Triad International Airport and was flown to American's headquarters in Dallas.
"Then it picked up passengers and went to Vail," Blakely said. "They found a loose seat, tightened it, went to Boston. The same seat was loose again. American fixed it. It went from Boston to Miami and that's when the seat actually came loose and that's when the pilot declared an emergency and it landed at JFK" in New York.
Copyright 2012 - News & Record, Greensboro, N.C.
