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| SAS grounds planes in safety fear | SAS grounds planes in safety fear |
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| Scandinavian airline SAS is to permanently stop flying Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 planes after several emergencies caused by landing gear problems. | |
| The decision came after a plane carrying 44 people from Bergen, Norway, to Copenhagen made an emergency landing in Denmark on Saturday. | |
| Nobody was seriously injured in the incident, the third involving an SAS Bombardier Q400 in two months. | Nobody was seriously injured in the incident, the third involving an SAS Bombardier Q400 in two months. |
| The SAS board decided to "immediately discontinue" using the planes. | |
| "Confidence in the Q400 has diminished considerably and our customers are becoming increasingly doubtful about flying in this type of aircraft," said chief executive Mats Jansson. | |
| And the airline's deputy chief executive, John Dueholm, said the Dash 8-Q400 had seen "repeated quality-related problems". | |
| "SAS's flight operations have always enjoyed an excellent reputation and there is a risk that use of the Dash 8-400 could eventually damage the SAS brand," he said. | "SAS's flight operations have always enjoyed an excellent reputation and there is a risk that use of the Dash 8-400 could eventually damage the SAS brand," he said. |
| Lease replacements | |
| The airline operates 27 of the 8-400s, which are used on many Nordic regional routes and for connections to destinations including the UK, Germany, Poland and Luxembourg. | |
| SAS said that since it began using the planes in 2000, they had accounted for about 5% of all passengers carried. | |
| The carrier, which had already cancelled more than 40 flights on Sunday after the Copenhagen incident, said it was inevitable that there would now be more flights shelved. | |
| It would look to fill the gap in schedules by reallocating planes in its current fleet and by leasing aircraft, it said. | |
| In September, Bombardier grounded almost half of its Q400 turboprop planes after equipment failures forced emergency landings of SAS planes in Denmark and Lithuania. | |
| At the time of the move, the Montreal-based company said that the groundings were a "precautionary measure", adding it believed its aircraft were "absolutely safe and reliable". | |
| The Q400 turboprop - which carries between 68 and 78 passengers - has been in use since 2000, and more than 160 of the planes have been delivered around the world. | |
| In March, an All Nippon Airways Q400 plane carrying 56 passengers and four crew landed safely after its nose gear failed to descend. |