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Plane Crashes: How Serious are Missed Inspections?

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Dallas, TXOn March 12, 2008, 43 planes in the Southwest Airlines fleet were grounded as the company had failed to perform required inspections of those planes for cracks. The number of planes affected is less than one-tenth of its fleet. So how much danger were passengers in? Was there a real risk of an airplane crash?

Southwest Airlines faces a civil penalty of more than $10 million for the missed inspection, the FAA announced. Southwest said of the 43 planes, 38 were removed from service so they could be inspected, while five were undergoing routine maintenance.

Plane InspectionA Southwest Airlines spokesperson said that the planes were pulled from service after the company obtained clarification from Boeing about the type of inspection (visual, magnetic or a combination of both) needed for the fuselage of some older planes.

The inspections took all of 90 minutes each for the six planes returned to service right away. By Thursday, almost all the planes were flying again.

Southwest Airlines reported that it had 520 Boeing 737 aircraft at the close of 2007. Almost 200 of them are the older models, including the Boeing 737-300, which required the extra inspections for cracks in the fuselage.

News reports quoted Southwest Chief Executive Gary Kelly saying he was concerned by findings from an internal investigation into the missed inspections. He announced that the Dallas-based company had placed three employees on paid leave while it investigated the situation.

What might be scarier is that, after Southwest failed to inspect, the FAA stated that at least one inspector looked the other way.

The grounding was basically a disagreement between Southwest and the FAA over what should have been inspected and how it should have been inspected. Southwest finally agreed that it should do what the FAA required, said Dr. Todd Curtis, aviation expert and Director of The Airsafe.com Foundation.

"Most were back in the air," said Curtis. "It wasn't something that kept the planes on the ground for any length of time."

He said it wasn't a situation of cracks and structural faults existing in the aircraft but instead, a situation of a defect in the inspection process.

That doesn't mean there wasn't any danger.

"Absolutely it was potentially dangerous," he said of failing to inspect for cracks. "A structural crack in an aircraft could start benignly and get serious depending on where the crack is."

He mentions the older model Boeing 737-200 Aloha Air crash as an example.

"It was a really old plane that had its roof come off in mid-flight," he said. Southwest has some older versions of the Boeing 737 and is phasing them out.

The Aloha crash, said Curtis, was unique in that it was a frequent flyer in a corrosive atmosphere. While it met the inspection criteria at the time, the criteria were inadequate for those unique damaging conditions. "Once they realized that, the inspection criteria for older 737s went up significantly," he said.

Southwest was flying for one week without meeting its inspection criteria and although the danger was minimal at best, it was dangerous nevertheless. "There wasn't immediate catastrophe," said Curtis, "but maybe a hairline crack could widen a wee bit. It isn't a fast progression."

But what happened with the Aloha disaster was that one piece of the aircraft came loose and the location of that fault was subject to the dynamic force of the air pushing against it, ripping it open like a can of sardines, he said."Depending on where the crack is," said Curtis, "it could affect the physical structure of the plane or major systems, like fuel."

It's a chance passengers shouldn't have to take. Aircraft should be inspected according to schedule for the protection of us all. It is the airlines themselves that do the inspections while the FAA oversees and approves the inspection process. In the Southwest Airlines case, the FAA ultimately caught the problem quickly and swooped down to halt flights.

Had they not done this, who knows what Southwest Airlines would have done—or when.

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