Smartwings (Czechia) (QS, Prague Václav Havel) has filed a lawsuit against Boeing (BOE, Washington National) for the damage done to its business as a result of the two fatal MAX 8 crashes and the MAX family's subsequent global grounding, the Seattle Times reports.
The Czech airline originally filed the suit in Chicago, where Boeing is headquartered, but a judge subsequently moved it to Seattle’s King County Superior Court.
According to the report, the airline seeks compensation for financial losses incurred, the return of one aircraft and the refund of payments on that jet, and advance payments on others.
Both Boeing and Smartwings declined to comment when contacted by ch-aviation.
The Seattle Times said Smartwings had ordered eight B737 MAX 8s directly from Boeing and agreed to lease an additional thirty-one, in line with a decision to switch to an all-MAX fleet.
It took delivery of its first B737 MAX 8 in January 2018 in a direct purchase from Boeing and took six more leased aircraft straight from the Renton assembly plant before the jet was grounded after the second crash in March 2019.
The airline has since dropped all of its remaining MAX commitments both with Boeing and with GECAS. Boeing had at one point stored a total of 13 undelivered MAXs built originally for Smartwings at various locations — including Renton; Moses Lake in Central Washington; San Antonio International, Texas; and Victorville, California. Most of those have already been remarketed to new buyers.
According to the ch-aviation fleets module, Smartwings’ fleet currently comprises seven B737 MAX 8s of which six are in active service, two with Smartwings (Poland) (3Z, Warsaw Chopin). It resumed flights with B737 MAX 8s in February this year when it deployed its first of the type to Malaga, Spain. The airline has stated it wants to gradually put another six of the type into operation this summer. It planned to deploy B737 MAX 8s from Prague Václav Havel, Tel Aviv Ben Gurion, Warsaw Chopin, or Bratislava on routes to the Canary Islands, Cabo Verde, Madeira, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Morocco, and Portugal.
Meanwhile, the airline in court papers alleged that in implementing a software addition to the MAX’s flight controls, “Boeing chose a cheap and hastily implemented band-aid” rather than more expensive aerodynamic changes to the airframe.
Smartwings also alleged that Boeing failed to conduct a full safety evaluation of the failure modes of the software, known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, and then allegedly “misled the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other regulators regarding the nature and purpose of MCAS.”
It further accused Boeing of “material misrepresentations and nondisclosures” to pilots and the airline for not flagging the existence of MCAS before the first crash and of “gross negligence and fraud.”
After the first crash in October 2018 of a Lion Air MAX in Indonesia, Smartwings officials wrote to Boeing demanding answers about the safety of the system but received no substantive response, according to the complaint.
Smartwings also operates two B737-700s, twenty-four B737-800s, and two B737-900ERs, ch-aviation fleets data reveals.
