WWTBAM Bored

It is more than $10 million for not inspecting cracks on dozens of its planes. The Federal Aviation Administration says that even after the inspections were ordered, the airline continued flying the planes. The cracks are tiny, but unless they are spotted by a trained eye, they can cause a lot of damage.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?secti ... id=6004475

I saw the network broadcast on this. First, Southwest reported it themselves to the FAA that these planes had missed inspections. It took the company a week or ten days (I can't recall) to complete them, once they realized it. Second, when they asked the FAA about it, whoever they contacted told them that it was okay to keep using the planes until they were inspected. The FAA is looking at their own procedures on this one, because that clearly should not have been the answer given.

I believe Southwest is appealing the fine, but I suspect it's more the size of it than the fact that it was levied. Self-reporting should count for something, because it shows that you're doing your internal audits, admitting to problems and working as fast as you can to correct them. Just as in politics, it's the cover-up that causes the bigger problem, not the actual event.

I have never flown on Southwest Airlines. I don't think that I ever will.

gsabc wrote: I believe Southwest is appealing the fine, but I suspect it's more the size of it than the fact that it was levied. Self-reporting should count for something....

Well...in my limited experience on stuff like this, self-reporting to the FAA is usually done (in part) to reduce the amount of the fine. In other words, the FAA would likely have caught this problem anyway in their regular auditing, and the fine would have been even larger had they said nothing.

We had a situation like this at CO, though for a much smaller issue. A couple of years ago, we started putting an additional medical kit on board all our planes. These kits are sealed to ensure that all the parts are there and not tampered with since the last inspection - and they're written up for replacement any time they're opened. Well, the new kit was much larger than the old one - and had two seals rather than one. We check our equipment prior to every flight, and many of our FA's had not gotten out of the habit of looking for only one seal.

Apparently we had one kit on one plane that had been opened but never used - and never written up for replacement. Fortunately it never caused an issue, but when that kit was due to be re-inspected (as they periodically are), it was discovered that one of the seals was broken. CO investigated it, and was able to track back to the flight when it had been opened. The FA's on that flight had failed to write it up after opening it, and it had been flying unsealed like that for many months.

CO self-reported the incident. The FA's who forgot to write it up were fined by the FAA, as well as every single FA who worked on that plane between that incident and it's discovery. There were hundreds of them, and the personal fines are NOT cheap. Those that had happened to fly that plane multiple times were fined per incident. Had CO not self-reported it and the FAA discovered it on their own in the mechanic's report, the fines would have been a lot higher for both the FA's and the company.

That's a relatively minor thing by comparison, but incidents like these are taken pretty seriously - and the FAA provides pretty good incentives for self-reporting.

I have flown them a lot lately but frankly don't find this suprising--their planes are almost always showing their age and in order to maintain their cheap fare advantage (in the face of rising fuel costs) they must be sorely tempted to cut corners. Still--there is not much more that's fundamental to the safety of a plane than checking for structual cracks.

So, do I want to keep flying an airline where I can fly RT to Buffalo for $100 even though they pull a stunt like this? Good question...

Well, if you have to report it yourself, what does the FAA need with 10 million bucks? They're not doing the inspections, are they?

I say, refund the airfare to all passengers who flew in that time period! (Okay, I flew SW once during that time. So I want my money back. So sue me....)