DALLAS – Southwest Airlines, the world’s biggest operator of Boeing Co. 737 jets, said it will continue flying 128 aircraft while catching up on missed inspections on the planes’ rudders.
Almost 80 of the Boeing 737-700 checks were completed by midday Wednesday, and the carrier expects to finish all 128 before a five-day deadline set by the Federal Aviation Administration, the airline said. The FAA said Southwest could operate the planes, which make up about one-fifth of its fleet, while conducting the reviews.
Southwest voluntarily grounded the planes for six hours Tuesday after discovering the maintenance lapse and notifying the FAA. The latest problem follows two instances in the last decade in which the Dallas-based airline was fined at least $10 million by the FAA for inadequate inspections or maintenance repairs.
“These airplanes have complicated inspection schedules,” said John Hansman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They go through a series of different progressive checks. It sounds like a tracking error oversight.”
The missed inspections involve standby hydraulic systems, which serve as the final backup to two primary levels of equipment, and the lowest of three intervals for the checks, the airline said. Each inspection takes about two hours, Southwest said.
“This is a periodic inspection of a backup system,” the FAA said in an emailed statement. “The FAA evaluated the risk and agreed that the airline could continue to operate the planes during this short interim.”
Southwest canceled 80 flights across its network Tuesday because of the missed inspections, said Brandy King, a spokeswoman for the carrier.
“The airline is anticipating very minimal impact to their operation as they complete the remaining checks,” King said. “We only expect around 15 to 19 cancels today as we reposition aircraft.”
Boeing’s twin-engine 737 is the world’s most widely flown jetliner, a workhorse model on short-haul flights like those flown by Southwest. Southwest is the world’s biggest discount carrier and had 665 planes in its all-737 fleet at the end of 2014.
Under FAA’s policy of overseeing airline safety for the past decade, Southwest probably won’t face an enforcement action or penalty for the lapse.
As part of a broader effort to improve safety as accidents have become increasingly rare and difficult to predict, the agency has begun encouraging pilots and carriers to come forward with safety errors voluntarily. In exchange for that openness, the FAA essentially gives airlines immunity if it finds that they didn’t make errors intentionally and didn’t mislead the agency.
“This is the way the system is supposed to work,” John Cox, a former 737 pilot who now heads a safety consulting company, said in an interview. “They discovered an inadvertent oversight and they brought it to the FAA’s attention.”
Cox said he never had to use the backup hydraulic system that Southwest failed to inspect during the 15 years he flew the 737. Pilots test it at least once a day to ensure it’s working, so the chances of it causing a safety problem in flight are extremely low, he said.
While the issue doesn’t appear to have compromised safety, it’s unusual for an airline to miss a mandatory inspection and the FAA will conduct an investigation to determine how the lapse occurred, he said. Cox is president of Washington-based Safety Operating Systems, which does airline safety audits and consulting.
The latest incident is a stark contrast to Southwest’s failure to perform inspections for fuselage cracks in 2006 and 2007. In that case, Southwest and an FAA manager knew about the missed inspections involving 46 jets used on almost 60,000 flights, and didn’t report them. The issue didn’t come to light until whistle-blowers brought it to congressional investigators. The FAA sought a then-record $10.2 million fine and Southwest later agreed to pay $7.5 million.
Southwest is opposing a proposed $12 million fine the FAA proposed last year for operating “numerous flights” in 2009 with inadequate repairs to fuselage skins. The maintenance was designed to eliminate potential cracks on 44 of the airline’s 737s. The repairs were done by a Southwest contractor.
Also in 2009, Southwest inspected all 181 of one model of 737 for metal weakness after a hole about a foot wide opened in a plane’s fuselage, forcing an emergency landing. No flaws were found, Southwest said at the time.
A year earlier, the FAA told American Airlines to park its Boeing MD-80s because of what the agency said were maintenance failures that led to chafed wires, misrouted wiring bundles and missing clamps. That incident forced American to cancel 3,300 flights — and came as the FAA faced criticism over its failure to oversee maintenance at Southwest.
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