PASSENGERS fainted when a 5-foot hole opened in the roof of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 flying from Phoenix to Sacramento last week. The most frightening moment may have been when, as one passenger said, “You could look out and see blue sky.”
It was an unusual episode in an industry with a strong safety record. But that record might be hard to sustain: on the very day that Southwest’s Flight 812 was diverted to Yuma, Ariz., for an emergency landing, the House of Representatives passed a bill likely to make it more difficult to detect and prevent midair ruptures, metal fatigue and other serious flight risks.
The bill would cut $4 billion from the Federal Aviation Administration’s $37 billion budget. Representative John L. Mica, a Florida Republican who is the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, says the bill would streamline F.A.A. programs and promised the bill would “not negatively impact aviation safety.”
Such streamlining would probably mean reduction of F.A.A. staff, including safety inspectors. As it is, the agency has been short-staffed for years. According to the Government Accountability Office, 1,100 inspectors oversaw 81 airlines, 5,200 repair stations, and 625,000 pilots in 2006. A $4 billion cut will necessarily reduce the work force further. And it’s hard to imagine this will not diminish safety.
For the last five years, I’ve been investigating airline maintenance outsourcing for Consumers Union. Outsourcing, under which airlines shift repair and maintenance work from union employees to low-wage workers overseas and in the United States, compounds the already existing burden on safety inspectors.
Dozens of F.A.A. inspectors have told me that they no longer have enough money to conduct inspections at repair stations in China, Singapore, El Salvador, the Philippines and Mexico and other distant locations at which major fleets of American-based airlines undergo maintenance.
One inspector explained that because money was tight, he had to schedule a visit to Asia weeks in advance, thus eliminating any chance of a surprise surveillance check. Safety inspectors commonly complain about not being able to “kick the tires” or otherwise closely scrutinize inspection work done in far-flung locations.
The number of foreign repair stations hired to service American planes more than doubled, to 731, from 2004 to 2009. There have been alarming revelations: the Department of Transportation reported the discovery in 2003 of a worker with ties to Al Qaeda at an overseas repair station. In 2005, immigration agents arrested 27 undocumented immigrants working at a North Carolina shop that airlines had contracted for repair work.
Worse, testifying before Congress in 2007, the inspector general of the Department of Transportation, Calvin Scovel III, described instances in which repair work has been contracted out by subcontractors to uncertified shops and unlicensed mechanics. These phantom shops sometimes consist of a sole mechanic who works from the back of a truck;in 2009 testimony, Mr. Scovel told Congress that the F.A.A. had no knowledge that critical work, including jet engine replacement, had been done in shops that had been sub-subcontracted. Though drug and alcohol testing is standard for all mechanics who service planes in the United States, a Senate committee found that some overseas repair shops don’t bother with such testing.
Southwest’s near-disaster last week was the latest in a series of problems caused by metal fatigue. There was a similar incident on a Southwest flight in 2009 and one involving an American Airlines Boeing 757 last year. Most chillingly, in 1988 a flight attendant was sucked out of an 18-foot hole in an Aloha Airlines plane 24,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean.
After the rip in Southwest Flight 812’s roof last week, the airline announced it would create additional inspection programs for its 737 fleet.
Now it’s up to the safety board to determine if last week’s events were due in part or in whole to Southwest’s maintenance program and or to the aviation agency’s oversight of that program.
The United States is justifiably proud of its commercial aviation safety record. But that record was built on hard work and forward thinking; cutbacks in the aviation agency’s budget will make it difficult for commercial airlines to maintain that record.
Aviation safety transcends party politics. White-knuckle moments onboard stricken commercial airlines shed light on the dangers of unsupervised maintenance — particularly if that light is shining through a gaping hole in the fuselage of a Boeing 737.
William J. McGee, the consumer advocate on the Department of Transportation’s Future of Aviation Advisory Committee in 2010, is writing a book about the airline industry.