Emergency checks are being made worldwide for “suspect components” in the tail of the widely flown latest or NG models of the Boeing 737 but the checks won’t hold up anyone flying in more than 100 of the jets in service with Qantas and Virgin Blue.

Only seven of the 41 Qantas 737s that are subject to the order will, for example, need to be checked within 12 days and this will take place during normal ground time.

The drama so far is administrative, except for the experience of 146 passengers on a comparatively new Ryanair 737-800, which began to shake violently after taking off from Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, for Madrid on March 2 and made an urgent landing at Brussels instead.

Following  that incident Boeing issued a service bulletin last Friday requiring 737 NG series operators to perform a series of checks and maintenance procedures on parts of the horizontal stabiliser, housed in the stubby wings near the tail of the jet.

But within hours of that bulletin being issued, it was reviewed by the US Federal Aviation Agency and replaced with an “emergency airworthiness directive” aimed a detecting and correcting “an unsafe condition that is likely to exist or develop on other airplanes of this same type design”.

The FAA said it had identified a failure path that could destroy the elevator or horizontal stabiliser, which keeps the nose of the jet from pitching up or down uncontrollably and could thus cause a crash.

The FAA’s action compels airlines to complete the checks and any remedial action according to deadlines that cannot be deferred, and also compels them to inform Boeing of their findings and actions so that the extent of the problem with the suspect components can be fully understood.

Qantas and Virgin Blue will have 12-30 days to comply and report in many instances, depending on the age of the jets and whether they are flown longer distances over water, and what work might have recently been performed on them to normal maintenance requirements.

There is, however, a history of elevator issues with older model 737s, which are now only rarely seen in Australia. When the obsolete 737-200 model was in service with Oz Jet, two of its charter flights experienced horizontal stabiliser failures and “flutter” leading to emergency landings.

Compliance with airworthiness directives has not been a strong point in Australian operations at the highest level in recent years.

In 2008 CASA denied any responsibility for ensuring such compliance following the discovery that Qantas had failed to complete an AD for repairs to some of its Boeing 737-400s for five years. However, before Easter 2001 it threatened to ground Ansett completely over its failure to apply an AD to its aged Boeing 767-200s, and before Christmas  2000 it was involved in the holiday grounding of the same fleet for Ansett’s failure to comply with a different aged airframe inspection AD.