United Will Bring Back Its Grounded Boeing 777 Planes

United Airlines says it will bring back the grounded Boeing 777-200 planes with the Pratt & Whitney engines “in the future.”

United’s planes with the PW4000 engines were grounded in February after an engine failure on a United flight to Honolulu from Denver dropped debris on a suburban Denver neighborhood.

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered immediate inspections of those planes before further flights. United said there had been progress.

“We look forward to getting that aircraft back to safe operations in the future,” United chief operations officer Jon Roitman said, according to Reuters News Service.

Within days of the late February incident over Denver, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it had ordered immediate inspections of Boeing 777 planes with Pratt & Whitney engines.

The FAA was most likely wary of the 20 months that the beleaguered Boeing 737 MAX was grounded after two separate crashes killed more than 340 passengers and crew.

Boeing revealed that only 128 planes had the PW4000 engines, which accounts for less than 10 percent of the 1,600-plus 777s currently in service. The company said only a few carriers in the United States, South Korea and Japan were still operating them.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) later announced that a cracked fan blade from the incident was consistent with metal fatigue.