As if it weren't bad enough when the damn engine fell off during take-off, now the entire Nationwide fleet has been grounded by the South African Civil Aviation Authority for at least another week.

OK, it is a South African carrier but it has been revealed that although Nationwide describes the aircraft as it's "own" and said it is not leased from KLM, it does have MAJOR maintenance performed by KLM in Amsterdam at perscribed intervals.

A spokesman said Nationwide was among other things, unable to indicate the life status on the leased Boeing 767.

I was wondering if anything so dramatic has ever happened to any other international carrier?

Sorry, should have read life status od "components" on the 767!

Lots of African and Middle-east carriers are on Europe's "no fly list". And last year, Pakistan International (which is a pretty large carrier) was told not to fly their older planes into Europe. I believe that was lifted recently.

So, lots of precedence.

I have never heard of Nationwide, but it seems like they have only one longhaul aircraft - the 767 in question.

To me, this is really not news.

Yes, they do only have one 767 for international flights and everyone was kicked off the 9pm flight to London. What a scramble to get alternative flights - but, thank goodness someone took a stand and said enough is enough.
By the way it was a smaller internal Nationwide plane that lost its engine.
I guess this opened the can of worms?

I don't really know the history of this airline, other than reading it on wikipedia. I am just saying these things are fairly common with small, newer, carriers - even in developed countries like South Africa.

This may be news on the Africa board as they have quite a few domestic and regional flight. But hardly news for on the Europe board, because of one daily flight to London...

There's nothing unusual about airlines having maintenance contracts to do work on others at their hub. There is only so much you can do with maintenance if the fleet is bad, and it sounds like they are grounded for lots of other reasons.