SWA fuselage failure (again)

[Matt Harper]

Having been fined $9m in 2009 for failing to conduct maintenance and remedy fuselage cracks in their older 737's they had a significant failure last week.
As said before, if they directed as much enthusiasm to keeping their equipment safe as they do is wise-cracking during the pre-flight pre-amble, they would be a lot better for it.
I hate having to use these ass-clowns for work travel.

http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20110404/news/7...

[Simpo Two]

$9m dollars would have paid for a lot of maintenance.

[shouldbworking]

Borrowing from pprune -
I took a quick look at B737-300 ADs involving fuselage frame and skin crack inspections. AD-2010-25-06 requires inspection of frames at STA 616 and 639 which, I believe, is on either side of row 12 in a 737-300. This is where the decompression occurred leading me to wonder if this aircraft had been inspected under this AD. The AD as issued allows the operator 4500 hours to perform the inspection. That's about a year and a half (using my fingers and toes) and the AD was issued 9 months ago. So, my guess is that SWA was operating the aircraft within the range of hours permitted by the FAA for the inspection and repair to be performed when this incident occurred. Go read the AD yourself here.

[Mojocvh]

Illuminating post on the pprune thread [http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/447575-southwest-flt-812-decompression-diversion-4.html] #127 of the topic onwards.

Come your own conclusions.

Mo.

Edited by Mojocvh on Thursday 7th April 14:14

[Matt Harper]

It is interesting to learn about what caused the failure - and if I understand correctly, it was an issue around cold bonding adhesive that is susceptible to poor adhesion due to condensation during the curing process - which lead to 'overloading' of the countersunk rivets holding the panels together.

What troubles me more is the lack of timely preventative maintenance, on the part of some airline operators. SWA has been frequently reprimanded for it's failure to perform preventative procedures on known issues (and it sounds like this latest failure was just that).

The reason it troubles me a lot, is that SWA is the biggest domestic carrier out of my home airport (Orlando International)- I travel very extensively and as a result am forced to use SWA a lot more frequently than I'd like. Added to which, they are in the process of 'swallowing-up' AirTran, my preferred (safest history, youngest fleet, best on-time record) domestic carrier - who's standards may now fall into SWA's crappy domain.

Edited by Matt Harper on Thursday 7th April 16:53

[Mojocvh]

Despite your misgivings about SWA

"What troubles me more is the lack of timely preventative maintenance, on the part of some airline operators"

how about the manufacturers getting it right first time round ?

[Matt Harper]

Mojocvh said:

Despite your misgivings about SWA

"What troubles me more is the lack of timely preventative maintenance, on the part of some airline operators"

how about the manufacturers getting it right first time round ?

Good point, Mojo - but what's done is done. Given that we know about the potential for trouble, how about we fix it right f*cking now, rather than ignore it until we absolutely have to address it by mandate - or when one of our 737's starts coming apart in flight.