Boeing’s had a tough go of it recently: After two crashes of its 737 Max jetliners in 2018 and 2019 resulted in a cumulative 346 deaths, the whole line was grounded for months and subsequent investigations confirmed the producer rushed out the craft with shoddy software program and with out sufficient oversight from industry-friendly regulators. Now the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered unrelated, however pressing, inspections of hundreds of Boeing planes.

According to Reuters, the FAA directed all operators of Boeing 737 collection plane to hold out repeated inspections of cabin altitude stress switches, which assist be sure that planes stay correctly pressurized throughout flight. Failure of the switches (two of that are in every airplane for redundancy functions) might consequence within the incapacitation of pilots, flight crew, or passengers. The order applies to 2,502 airplanes registered within the U.S. and is prone to impression one other 9,315 throughout the globe. While the FAA doesn’t have authorized authority over planes flown completely exterior the U.S., Bloomberg reported, it’s pretty sure that international regulators will concern comparable orders or that international 737 operators will perform such inspections even when they’re not legally mandated.

According to Reuters, the inspection order follows studies in September 2020 by one operator that the switches failed on three completely different 737 fashions of plane, though the FAA didn’t point out in its order that there have been any studies the failures occurred in the midst of a flight. The information company wrote that after the preliminary report, Boeing carried out its personal investigation and decided there was no concern. But the FAA and Boeing revisited the matter and decided in May 2021 that “the failure rate of both switches is much higher than initially estimated, and therefore does pose a safety issue.” The FAA wrote it “does not yet have sufficient information to determine what has caused this unexpectedly high failure rate,” Reuters added.

The assessments should be carried out inside 2,000 flight hours of the final take a look at of the switches, earlier than 2,000 flight hours for the reason that concern was ordered, or inside 90 days, whichever comes first.

“Safety is our highest priority and we fully support the FAA’s direction, which makes mandatory the inspection interval that we issued to the fleet in June,” Boeing wrote in an announcement to information retailers.