It looks like Norwegian is already asking its 737 Max flights to return to their departing airports, at least according to this recent screenshot I found on reddit [1]
Wow. This is pretty ridiculous considering all three of these planes seem to have been closer to their destination than the origin, making it safer to just finish the planned flight.
Both incidents have been in the first few minutes of flight and this is also a 'long term safety' thing. They're relatively safe to fly still.
On the other hand, if your plane gets stuck in a foreign country the bill just for parking the thing could be massive. Better to get it back while you still can.
Eventually the bill can get so high that it doesn't make financial sense to still attempt to claim to be the owner. As of January there was a McDonnell Douglas MD87 in Madrid thats abandoned. Three 747 were sold for scrap in 2017 after they were abandoned at Kuala Lumpur.
> From the effective date and time of this AD, do not operate the aeroplane, except that a single
non-commercial ferry flight (up to three flight cycles) may be accomplished to return the aeroplane
to a location where the expected corrective action(s) can be accomplished.
So they are allowed to be ferried in certain situations.
The MCAS problem cannot occur when flaps are deployed, and it happens when flaps are initially retracted. So if it hasn't happened by now, it's not going to.
I was on a Norwegian plane once going from Oslo to London, 3/4 into the journey, just before descending into Gatwick, we got told the plane is turning around due to fault on the plane. So deflating when you are nearly home. The pilot did a good job calming everyone down and explaining it was a minor fault, two duplicate sensors were showing different values, but still, enough to recall the plane.
So basically another 1.5h flight back to Oslo, a few hours wait, then on a replacement plane (thank god) with another flight back to London. A long day.
I can, however, understand it. As with this 737 Max-8s they did not want the plane grounded in an airport where they don't have a full service centre with parts etc. Had it only been a few years later we could have continued as they made Gatwick one of their major hubs with probably full stock of parts.
Though I do have a rule of preferring flying out from an airport with a "local" airline, as they are quite likely to have parts and chances of spare or frequent incoming planes to shuffle around to.
I had the same experience with an Easyjet flight, which departed from the Easyjet hub (also Gatwick) and returned there.
The pilot strongly implied that had I been on the British Airways flight, we'd have continued to the destination: BA would have flown their spare pilot + spare plane + repair crew out.
I speculate we’ll see more airspace closures once countries give enough time to avoid stranding their nationals.
I wonder if, say, Germany, waited until its planes had to chance to land before closing their airspace, while other countries/companies, like Norwegian got caught by surprise.
The closest thing to a German 737 MAX are 15 owned by TUI, which seem to all be based in the UK.
There hasn't been much fleet renewal in the German market in recent years, just lots of consolidation (it's actually a bit of a lottery to buy a ticket in advance due to all the bankruptcies)
[1] https://i.redd.it/6gtecemacpl21.png