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Comment by alexhutcheson | Hacker News Reader

Airlines with Airbus fleets are dealing with lengthy periods of unavailability due to issues with the Pratt & Whitney engines that power ~60% of A320neos and all A220s[1]. My understanding is that the airlines have agreements where P&W will eventually compensate them for this, but Airbus fleets haven't been without headaches.

[1] https://crankyflier.com/2023/09/26/the-problem-with-pratt-wh...

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A company I use often, Wizz Air, had/has to regularly ground these planes. It’s always a safe bet to book seats at the front of the plane to be sure that your seat doesn’t magically disappear when you are at the gate (happened last Easter when they sold seats for a 180 seats plane but had to ground it and sent a smaller one last minute). The only silver lining here is that they caught the problems before any plane actually crashed because of them

>It’s always a safe bet to book seats at the front of the plane to be sure that your seat doesn’t magically disappear when you are at the gate

Why? Do they bump the rear seats first?

his 2nd one says they send a smaller plane. it'd make sense a simple algorithm would map 1a1b1c1d1e to 1a1b1c1d2a2b etc. the rear most seats get bumped.

A lot of times they are narrower too, guess you want seats with a low letter too (17A vs 17G).

yeah that's why I mapped seats in the first row into the second :) maybe they just truncate the extra seats instead of move them back. i don't know

All WizzAir planes have 3-3 seatings.

I assume people who pay less and/or are less costly to compensate (adults, people without babies, etc) get bumped first.

The relatively new “basic economy” class instead of “economy”.

According to the fleet data here (and assuming it is up to date) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizz_Air#Fleet a scheduled 180 seat plane would not have been a A321neo and hence not been affected by the mentioned Pratt & Whitney engine problems.

But since the A320-200 is the smallest aircraft in their fleet, maybe the flight was scheduled with a A321neo but got replaced with a A320-200?

So the main issue they have is the biggest piece of American technology they use.

Oy. As an American it's rough to see the state of U.S. aviation.

I'd like to see some SpaceX veterans spin up a jet engine company. SX500 FTW

Pratt & Whitney is a business unit of United Technologies Corporation. UTC merged with Raytheon a couple years ago. Raytheon was already a dysfunctional corporate culture, and what I hear is that the UTC management that took over is somehow even more risk averse than the old Raytheon leadership, which is hard to imagine.

Risk aversion is probably a good thing if you want an engine that will work reliably. But it's not going to produce the next big thing or massively scale output on short timelines.

At least their planes don't fall out of the sky, because some morons cheaped out on the software and they don't have to get special inspections every other week because Boeing forgot to put a bolt in the Rudder, Door etc...

This airline went bankrupt: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/engine-di...

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