New Details: Finnair Explains The Embarassing Cleaning Blunder That Has Grounded Eight Airplanes

Finnair has provided new details about an embarrassing blunder that has grounded eight of its airplanes and stranded at least 11,000 passengers after over-zealous cleaners washed off a special fire-retardant coating applied to the material seat covers.

Last week, the Helsinki-based carrier was forced to suddenly take the eight Airbus A321 single-aisle aircraft out of service when it emerged that the water cleaning method Finnair had chosen could pose an unacceptable fire risk.

At the time, Finnair said that it had followed the manufacturer’s cleaning instructions, leaving a massive question mark over how this situation could have materialized in the first place.

With Finnair now preparing to return six of the airplanes back to service by the end of the week, the airline has provided an explanation that clears up the confusion.

It turns out that a long-standing third-party vendor had produced the material covers for Finnair’s seats, which were made by another company. The original seat manufacturer provided instructions to clean these seats with water, but unbeknownst to Finnair, this was an inappropriate cleaning method for the newer seat covers.

Following its usual two-year cleaning program, Finnair set about cleaning the seat covers with water, and only once all the planes had been cleaned was it discovered that the seat cover manufacturer didn’t recommend this method.

What remains unclear, however, is who is to blame for this mix-up. Whoever it is will likely pick up the tab for replacing the 1,700 seat covers that needed to be discarded, along with potentially hundreds of thousands of Euros in compensation for passengers who had their flights delayed or canceled.

“We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption this has caused to our customers,” commented Pekka Korhonen, Finnair’s SVP of Technical Operations.

Pekka explained: “The safe operation of our flights is the foundation of everything we do. Once we received information that the impact of washing on the fire protection of the seat covers had not been verified in the required manner, it was clear that the aircraft had to remain on the ground until the issue was resolved.”

The first of the eight grounded airplanes has already returned to service, and Finnair hopes to have all the planes back in the air by the end of October. Given the scale of replacing so many seat covers in such a short period of time, Finnair has been forced to source covers from multiple manufacturers.

The use of fire-retardant materials in airplane cabins is of paramount importance, although the airline industry didn’t always take the risk of an onboard fire quite so seriously.

Until the 1980s, airlines would use highly combustible materials in their cabins, although that all changed following two horrific accidents that changed the industry forever.

In both of these accidents, investigators concluded that far more passengers would have escaped with their lives if it weren’t for the fact that they succumbed to smoke inhalation.