An investigator looked at a hole on top of a Southwest Airlines plane that had to make an emergency landing on Monday. Southwest ordered inspections of nearly 200 aircraft after a hole opened up in the passenger cabin of the plane during flight.
(Chris Dorst/The Charleston Gazette via Associated Press)
Southwest yet to find flaws on 737s
An investigator looked at a hole on top of a Southwest Airlines plane that had to make an emergency landing on Monday. Southwest ordered inspections of nearly 200 aircraft after a hole opened up in the passenger cabin of the plane during flight.
(Chris Dorst/The Charleston Gazette via Associated Press)
Southwest Airlines Co. said it has found no flaws so far during inspections for metal weakness on all 181 of its Boeing Co. 737-300 jets after a hole about a foot wide opened in a plane’s fuselage, forcing an emergency landing.
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigators will examine the jet, said Les Dorr, an FAA spokesman. The agency will check whether Southwest complied with any safety directives regarding the area of the plane with the hole, which appears to be about 1 foot by 1 foot, he said.
“There’s really no way to speculate on what caused it right now,’’ Dorr said. “It certainly is an unusual occurrence.’’
All 126 passengers and five crew were safe after landing in Charleston, W.Va., on the flight Monday from Nashville, Marilee McInnis, a spokeswoman for the Dallas-based carrier, said yesterday. The jet lost pressure about 30 minutes after taking off at about 4:30 p.m., causing oxygen masks to deploy.
The plane involved is 15 years old, more than the company’s average aircraft age of 10 years, and the area where the hole formed was last inspected on Jan. 9, McInnis said.
“Nothing like this has ever happened at Southwest before,’’ McInnis said.
The hole formed between the tail and the middle of the cabin near the top of the fuselage, McInnis said. She said there were no reports of an explosion on the 137-seat plane.
Southwest has 544 jets in its fleet, all belonging to Boeing’s 737 line. One-third of them are 737- 300s with an average age of 17.7 years, according to the carrier’s regulatory filings.
Southwest agreed this year to pay a $7.5 million penalty for flying jets without fuselage inspections in 2006 and 2007. The FAA said Southwest operated 46 planes on 59,791 flights without full checks for cracks. Southwest has said safety wasn’t compromised by flying the planes.
Boeing staff is being sent to West Virginia to assist in the investigation, said Sandra Angers, a spokeswoman in Seattle. She declined to comment on whether similar cases have developed with the aircraft, referring accident questions to the NTSB.
Southwest passengers have an average trip length of 855 miles, compared to 1,090 miles for all US airlines, according to data by Southwest and the US Department of Transportation.
“The more cycles you fly, the more times you pressurize the plane and thump it down for landings, and that tends to put more wear and tear on the airplane,’’ said Fred Kline, president of Aviation Specialists Group, a Herndon, Va., company that assists companies in valuing and inspecting aircraft.
McInnis said she didn’t immediately know the relative wear of the plane that developed the hole.
About two-thirds of Southwest’s fleet is made up of 737-700s, which have an average age of 5.5 years and reduce the overall average fleet age, the company’s filing shows.
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