Letters to the Editor
-
The FAA has a cozy relationship with Southwest Airline?
If I ever need to travel to the South, West, East, or North....
I think I'd rather take a canoe to Cuba to buy a '55 chevy...
A airplane makes me wish for a cozy relation with a rhino?...
To crawl under a airplane seat to sleep with a possum?....
I'd just roll into a fetal-ball-position and hope to land?....
Why fly anywhere if they don't even give a bag of nuts?....
It's scary. If a possum crawls up under a seat with me?....
Maybe I'd fly?
Fly to a local pet,
or hardware store.
-
Thanks.
Thanks for the analysis. You made me feel a little better. I fly Southwest often and hearing the news that they violated regulations made me very angry and also scared.
The news that airplanes are often flown in less than perfect condition does not offer any comfort to me, though I know I have to accept it as reality...in the medical field, of which I am a part, it is very much the same way. We can't predict everything. We sometimes know the drugs we administer will not be 100% effective, or may carry side effects. But we do it anyway.
That disappoints me less than hearing how corporations - especially Southwest, which appeared to have a much friendly customer service philosophy than other airlines - get away with not fulfilling their responsibilities. And for that, as you said, they should be held accountable to the maximum degree.
-
You have your facts wrong...
Southwest did NOT fly with known cracks, they found them after they grounded the aircraft. Every news paper, web article in the country states that except you...so much for your insight.
-
Classic mistake
It is a common error to excuse reckless behavior by pointing to safety margins. "We've got a safety margin," one tells the other. But the point of safety margins is to make room for the unanticipated. If you use them up on known risks, you have obliterated your safety margin. At that point, you have no safety margin.
Smith's defense of Southwest is that they could use their safety margin to excuse unsafe behavior, and it reveals the logical error I cite. There is no man bites dog here. Did Southwest put its passengers in danger? Yes.
-
MEL / CDL & Pilot Pushing
Your statement that "no respectable airline will pressure a crew to operate any flight," is, at best, your optimistic opinion. At both major airlines for which I flew as Captain, there was pressure, albeit somewhat subtle. Given an inoperative component that became a "captain's decision" item (i.e. a generator, where factors such as weather, night, other inop items, impact the decision) a common comment by the maintenance supervisor was "We have no spare. If you refuse the aircraft we'll have to cancel the flight." The implication is that you are a bad person costing the airline money and inconveniencing passengers, and therefore should ignore your safety concerns and take it anyway.
Of course, when my response was, "Fix it or cancel it," miraculously, a spare would appear, usually a plane for a flight that was scheduled for a later departure, giving them time to fix the broken airplane and put it on the later flight, or, as happens occasionally, give the still-broken aircraft to a captain more easily pressured.
You are an airline pilot - I think you know of, or have first hand experience with, this sort of "pilot pushing." It is common throughout the industry. You do your readers a disservice by not providing them with full disclosure. Perhaps other airline pilots will have other scenarios to relate in this area, and you can write a column that accurately addresses pilot pushing in the areas of maintenance as well as flying fatigued ("We have no spare crew. Can you just get it to Siberia for us? We'll give you an extra day off."
-
Probably not but in the long messy slider toward slackerism they will soon.
Everything is inexorably becoming half assed & lazy. Sure, they didn't actually kill anyone this time but soon enough the creeping sands of dumbass third world standards, laziness, drunken corrupt bad management, I'm sorry sir I'm terribly unable to help you will eventually kill someone. And that's fine. C- is the new A.
-
Remember 'get-there-itis'?
Remember the investigations that happened after the crash outside Dallas in the middle of a huge thunderstorm. They one that is touted as 'creating doppler radar'?
Pilots are only human and they were found to be influenced in a bad way by the pressures of their job, of the airlines need to stick to schedule. Yes the crash of a plane would cost millions if not billions but the lack of a major crash has built a culture of hubris in the airline industry.
Southwest is found to have not inspected their planes. So what. There hasn't been a major crash since 2001. What are the chances of it happening now?
United is found to have inspected their 747's with equipment that wasn't calibrated properly. So what. There hasn't been a major crash since 2001. What are the chances of it happening now.
I would think that given today's regulatory environment and the influence of lobbying groups and industry whining on regulators, that it's only a matter of time before we see a major crash again like we saw in the 70's.
Remember Rumsfeld's 'known knowns' and 'known unknowns' speech? Right now we know that the airlines are cutting corners we just don't know how far and how many and we know they pressure pilots too.
For those that are afraid to fly, I'm not saying that the very next plane that you ride will crash. The chances of any one plane crashing are still significantly low. Airline maintenance and regulatory compliance issues just make it incredibly slightly more possible that it could happen. Stack the deck subtly but there are inherent risks in everything...
-
Airworthiness
Patrick, you have a great future in airline management: Your willingness to render subjective judgements on the soft side makes you a natural. I can almost hear you say: "If it flew in, it will fly out."
It needs to be emphasized that when the FAA finds an airline culpable of a maintenance violation, it is strictly based on that airline's documentation of the maintenance process. No FAA "inspector" ever looks at the aircraft: he or she could probably not locate on the aircraft the area or component under evaluation without extensive assistance (like the earnest, young FAA inspector who diligently tried to observe our work on a GE engine, as he pretended to follow along in a Rolls Royce manual). Most pilots could not locate it, either. The actual, nuts-and-bolts condition of that aircraft is determined primarily by airline maintenance personnel.
By the time an entity as sluggish and unispired as the FAA gets around to issuing an Airworthiness Directive, you can rest assured the issue is quite serious. While the conditions an FAA Airworthiness Directive seeks to correct appear straightforward, the application of the Directive can be somewhat subjective, bending to the interpretations of airline management, rank-and-file mechanics and FAA personnel as well. These interpretations often lead to mistakes; occassionally to criminal oversight. Whether you misinterpret or outright falsify the findings of an Airworthiness Directive, you've made a colossal and dangerous error.