S.Outhwest Airlines is said to have endangered the safety of thousands of flights by forcing its pilots to fly outside the safety limits recommended by Boeing for operating the airline’s fleet of 737 aircraft.
This indictment is in a new Senate Committee report as part of a damning indictment against the Federal Aviation Administration’s oversight of the safety of U.S. air passengers. The committee is chaired by Senator Roger Wicker, Republican, from Mississippi.
Serious concerns about the safety of Southwest’s working practices arose among a whistleblower, an experienced former Navy pilot, Jeffrey Rees, who served as one of the FAA’s safety inspectors at the airline’s Texas base.
Rees, who agreed to be identified in the report, says Southwest has made changes to an automated system that determines whether or not an aircraft can safely exit the gate that were “incredibly dangerous.”
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Rees focused on a program, Performance Weight and Balance System, PWB, that is part of a critical pre-takeoff pilot checklist that Southwest introduced in 2017.
All airlines use a similar system to achieve optimum efficiency for each flight: balancing how much fuel is needed, how much cargo can be carried, the distribution of passenger load, along with specific conditions at the airport at departure – weather, wind direction, air temperature, length of the runway and the height of the airport above sea level.
The outcome of these calculations is intended to provide pilots with sufficient safety margins to ensure that there is no risk involved in all circumstances.
Rees claims that Southwest has removed previous “security buffers”, significantly reducing margins of error.
Striking detail, the report cites instances where pilots had difficulty getting their aircraft into the air and had to “aggressively use electronic trim switches” during take-off to get off the runway, exceeding Boeing’s recommended limits for safe handling.
That meant that the nose of the plane was at a point where it would almost cause an aerodynamic stall, which at that height would end with the plane crashing.
A Southwest pilot quotes, “I can tell you without reservation that PWB has been a handicap for me to fly a 737 safely from A to B.”
A big reason for narrowing the margin of safety, the report says, is that Southwest wanted to increase the amount of cargo per flight. Belly cargo – cargo that goes into the hold – is a growing source of income.
Brandy King, a Southwest spokesperson, told the Daily Beast, “We discovered a discrepancy between data systems related to the weight of a number of aircraft earlier this year. Southwest took immediate action to prevent a recurrence, including notifying the FAA, correcting the data discrepancies, and initiating a daily audit to assess each of the affected systems.
“As a result, and out of an abundance of caution, we stopped flying those planes for a short time to recalculate the aircraft weights and reset the program.”
In fact, the record shows that Southwest is a frequent offender when it comes to safety issues, especially when it comes to quality of maintenance.
In April 2011, a Southwest 737 with 118 passengers on board reached its cruising altitude of 36,000 feet when there was an explosive hull structure failure that left a 50-inch hole in the cabin roof. The pilots sent a Mayday call – “we lost the cabin” – and managed to make an emergency landing.
The affected aircraft was an older model of the 737, delivered in 1996, and was prone to cracking the fuselage skin due to corrosion. Two years earlier, the airline had been fined $ 7.5 million by the FAA for failing to conduct inspections to detect cracks in planes that made nearly 6,000 flights.
The problem persists to this day: In March, a Southwest 737 crash-landed after a 12-inch crack appeared above the cabin.
In 2017, FAA inspectors discovered “potentially serious gaps” in the maintenance of 88 older 737s that Southwest purchased after being used by other airlines. The Senate report is very critical of the airline’s track record on these aircraft, saying that numerous repairs performed “fell short of airworthiness requirements.”
Now, the challenges pilots face with the introduction of changes to the PWB system have reinforced the impression that the airline is regularly cutting back on profit.
Last January, the FAA filed a $ 3.92 million civil fine after discovering that 21,505 flights were performed with incorrect weight and balance settings. Still, Rees warned Senate investigators that “non-compliance is ongoing” and that it has gotten worse because pilots were “inadequately trained and prepared” for them.
Southwest pioneered the budget airline business model that has been copied around the world. It is based on using one type of aircraft – in the case of the successive models of the Boeing 737 in the Southwest – and making the most of it, with as many as seven flights a day with fast turnaround time at each airport.
This model has evolved over four decades in Southwest without catastrophic crashes and, taking into account the intensity of its flight schedules, the airline has an exemplary safety record that undoubtedly reflects the quality of its pilots.
As of 2017, however, Rees has been critical of the way the airline trains its pilots. He was particularly concerned about the implementation of new training standards required in 2019 and imposed by the FAA following the 2009 crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 that killed all 49 people on board.
That crash exposed a problem that has been identified worldwide: As cockpits become more and more automated pilots, they have lost the ‘sit-in-the-pants’ skills that used to be foundational in dealing with an emergency.
The FAA recommended that airlines select a small group of their best pilots for the new training program to brush up on their own skills and then instruct the rest of the pilots. As an ex-Navy “Top Gun” pilot, Rees had a full understanding of the problem, because flying from aircraft carriers requires sharp reflexes and a good feel for an aircraft’s behavior.
Rees told Senate detectives that in his opinion at least 50 percent of Southwest’s flight crews needed retraining, but instead of following the principle of creating a small core of instructor pilots, Southwest assigned 400 pilots to complete the process. and that this’ ruled out adequate quality. check.”
Rees claimed that when he suggested that his FAA supervisor send a warning letter to Southwest that the training program was seriously flawed, the supervisor instructed another FAA inspector to write a “softer” letter. Southwest has not made any changes, he said.
Indeed, the Senate Committee report often paints a picture of ambivalence in the way the FAA oversees Southwest security – issues are exposed, often only after they become endemic, civil penalties are imposed, but the ongoing oversight of the FAA on the ground is lax and tends to calm down rather than confront.
Spokesman King said: “We absolutely disagree with the allegations of undue influence in the report. Southwest has never inhibited or hindered the FAA’s ability to exercise oversight. “
Southwest’s route structure across the country includes a wide variety of airports and changes in seasonal climates which in turn mean that the pilots must be familiar with many different and rapidly changing conditions at the most critical stages of a flight, take-off and landing. often in one day.
As a result, Rees warned the Senate Committee of the impact of the changed PWB standards on pilots flying in and out of airports with shorter runways, where the margin of error with a fully loaded 737 is tight. He said some pilots had taken pictures showing that the margin had become “low or nonexistent”.
According to the Senate report, the committee staff spoke to multiple pilots who confirmed Rees’s report and shared his concerns, but feared they would be fired if they spoke up.