U.S. regulators recently considered grounding more than three dozen Southwest jets because the airline couldn’t show that they met all mandatory safety standards
By Andy Pasztor and Alison Sider Updated Nov. 11, 2019 9:28 pm ET U.S. regulators recently considered grounding more than three dozen Southwest Airlines Co. jets because the airline couldn’t show that they met all mandatory safety standards, according to government documents.
Southwest told the FAA in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that it considered the issue more of a record-keeping problem than a safety risk. Late last week, after discussions between senior FAA and Southwest officials, the agency permitted the planes to continue carrying passengers once Southwest agreed to accelerate required inspections so all the aircraft will be checked out completely by the end of January, according to people familiar with the discussions.
“A small number of repairs on a few aircraft had been performed but not properly classified by the previous owners because of differences in language and repair criteria,” a Southwest spokeswoman said More recently, the FAA’s moves to require Southwest to resolve outstanding questions sparked congressional interest. The issue of undocumented maintenance was highlighted in preliminary findings the inspector general’s staff presented to the FAA weeks ago, which in October prompted the agency to take action and explain the situation to various House and Senate panels.
Mr. Foushee’s memo explained details of efforts by Southwest and the FAA to verify the condition of all 88 foreign airliners the carrier merged into its domestic fleet. He criticized the carrier’s procedures, writing that at the time the FAA gave permission for the planes to fly in the U.S., Southwest “admitted that they had not even translated all the maintenance records into English.”
The current questions raised by lawmakers mirror difficulties faced a decade ago by Southwest, its leaders and the FAA, in another controversy over maintenance compliance. In 2009 Southwest agreed to pay $7.5 million in penalties to settle allegations that it operated 46 aircraft on 60,000 flights without completing mandatory maintenance checks for potential fuselage cracks.
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