More Cracks Found in Southwest Airlines Planes

Share This Story

Southwest Airlines have discovered further crack indications in the lap joints of three of their Boeing 737-300s, similar to the one that is thought to have caused the incident on a recent flight. However, nineteen other aircraft showed no problems and have now returned to service.

On Friday, a flight that had just left Phoenix developed a 1.5m-long gash in its fuselage. A loud bang was reported by some of the 118 people on board, causing a sudden drop in cabin pressure and forcing the pilots to make an emergency descent. The plane managed to land safely at a military base in Arizona.

Thankfully, no one was seriously injured, although a flight attendant was slightly hurt in the incident.

A section of the fuselage was removed and sent to The National Transportation Safety Board headquarters for further inspection and closer examination of the lap joint revealed additional cracks.

Six hundred flights have been cancelled by Southwest so far, to enable engineers to carry out tests on the remaining aircraft, and normal service is not expected to return until Tuesday evening.

The crack problem has been described as a "new and unknown issue" by the CEO of Southwest Airlines.

Most of the major airlines carry out extensive and regular checks of their aircraft to ensure that problems of this kind can be avoided and one can only assume that either the equipment used in these tests was incapable of finding the fault, or the people carrying out the tests were not doing their job properly.

The plane in question had reportedly been in service for some 15 years, but there are many aircraft (especially in places like Russia) that have been working for much longer, so it is uncertain whether age was a factor in this incident.

Changes in Southwest's maintenance program were made when 'metal fatigue' caused a similar problem in one of its aircraft in 2009 and they had to pay millions of dollars following charges that it was skipping inspections. However, Southwest has stated that "we were in compliance with the FAA-mandated and Boeing-recommended structural inspection requirements" in respect of the aircraft involved in the incident on Friday.