After cracks were found in three more 737-300s, just days after the fuselage of a Southwest Airlines jet blew open mid-flight, the Federal Aviation Administration announced today that it will issue an emergency directive tomorrow requiring airlines to inspect approximately 175 additional early-model Boeing 737s for similar damage.
The FAA airworthiness directive will require initial inspections using electromagnetic, or eddy-current, technology in specific areas of the aircraft fuselage on certain Boeing 737 aircraft in the -300, -400 and -500 series that have accumulated more than 30,000 flight cycles. It will then require repetitive inspections at regular intervals.
Bad news for Boeing? Possibly the opposite. Southwest, which operates 552 Boeing 737s, is looking to expand and modernize its fleet in the coming years, and CEO Gary Kelly has already said that they would likely buy 737-800s. So who knows… perhaps the bad publicity generated by aging jets might spur Southwest to move a little quicker?
Why bother?
Just condemn them and force airlines to replace them with more efficient modern planes that use half the fuel, or turboprops.
That would:
a. create US jobs;
b. reduce pollution and global warming;
c. kickstart the economy.
But that would be smart …
You forgot “d. bankrupt the airlines.” Dumbass.
Lest we forget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havillan…
Now that we understand crack propagation planes don’t seem to do that anymore, except when bombs are involved.
@2 that is because airlines have been losing money since time started, and started losing more since the TSA made their entire operations even more inefficient.
Air France just ordered a batch of Embraer SA’s.
Adapt or die.
Jesus Will, you’re so fucking stupid, your stupidity made me forget what I was going to write. Just to be clear, you’re so stupid your stupidity is contagious across space and time!
What @5 said.
@4 Broken window fallacy. Look it up.
When jet fuel prices will go up – a given – and costs have risen due to higher “security” – e.g. TSA – then your cost per passenger is too high to be sustained.
You either reduce costs (e.g. lower fuel costs, or new more efficient planes) or you get government subsidies or you fix the underlying problems.
Arguing with me about not replacing aging and falling apart planes won’t address the underlying problem, which I correctly identified. The corporations have already pushed down pilot and crew costs (labor) fairly low.
Considering that there are plenty of 30-year and older jets in the air, and not just for African, former Soviet-bloc, and Chinese carriers, it’s worth noting that the drafty Southwest 737 was 15 years old but had been through 45,000 flight cycles (pressurization/depressurization, which causes metal fatigue)–that’s 8.2 flights per day on average.
Don’t forget the convertible-model 737 that was Aloha Airlines Flight 243, which the pilots got back down on the ground with one life lost–a flight attendant pulled overboard during the rapid decompression. That plane had sustained 89,090 cycles, the second highest number for a plane in the world at the time.
People need to understand the true choices available in airline travel:
A. Cheap
B. Convenient
C. Safe
Pick any two.
Hey now – Will just wants to show his village idiot bona fides are still in good order. Nothing wrong with that.
@10, you can bet that it isn’t just Southwest with this problem. The Greyhound of the sky model isn’t just for the discount airlines anymore.
Cheap? Convenient? Safe?
Seems to me like you’d be lucky to get any one of them.
@7–forgot this earlier–Flanders & Swann discuss events before and after the glazier’s visit.
(I will grab any excuse, however flimsy, to share a Flanders & Swann song.)
@2 Not in Will’s defense, but pretty much every airline has bankrupted themselves flying ancient aircraft with minimal maintenance.
Just nationalize commercial air travel and end this silly charade. All it has accomplished is to make millionaires of knucklehead executives. There really isn’t much “choice” when flying anyhow.
@15, and yet, and yet: air travel is safer now than it has ever been, ever ever ever. Something is wrong with your model. Finding anything useful or true in something Will wrote was your first sign.
The system that finds fatigue and cracks BEFORE the plane falls out of the sky is the system that’s working the way it’s supposed to.
But listening to Will lecture the airlines about a topic that has pretty much always been in the forefront of their minds, for fifty years at least, is an entertaining substitute for knowing anything about anything. My thesaurus has run out of synonyms for “stupid” in his case. There isn’t anything more to be said.
Fnarf, that’s why I just stick to calling him a dumbass at this point. It seems to work.
I was all for ignoring him, but he simply reached new heights of stupidity. He’s very likely a genius at being stupid.
But calling Will a “dumbass” is like calling Hitler “mean” or Picasso “talented” or Bill Gates “comfortably well off”. It doesn’t even begin to touch on the seemingly endless ways in which he extends the possibilities of “dumbass”.
What we need here is a Scotsman. Now those guys know how to call you a dimwit.
@16 Actually, the model is correct. The prevention system you cited works because it is government mandated. If left to their own devices, the airlines would skimp on safety to disasterous results. (SWA already comes close.) We’ve seen it in virtually every other industry, and the airlines have proven themselves to be poorly run in areas without government regulation, so you’d have to expect it in this case too.
Air travel really isn’t much of a “free market”, with that heavy hand of government, so what we get is just the race to the bottom.