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What could possibly go wrong?

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
40,146
16,543
Riding the baggage carousel.
Guess they shouldn't have been blowing off all those fueslage inspections.


Passengers hug Southwest pilot after landing
Hole in fuselage causes pressure-loss scare on Boeing 737
The Associated Press
updated 9:12 a.m. MT, Tues., July 14, 2009
CHARLESTON, W. Va. - Southwest Airlines Co. inspected about 200 planes overnight after a football-sized hole opened up in the passenger cabin of a jet in flight, forcing an emergency landing in West Virginia.

Travelers on the Boeing 737 aircraft could see through the 1-foot-by-1-foot hole that appeared during the flight Monday. The cabin lost pressure, but no one was injured on the Nashville-to-Baltimore flight with 126 passengers and five crew members on board.

Passenger Brian Cunningham told NBC's "Today" show Tuesday that he had dozed off in his seat in mid-cabin when he was awakened by "the loudest roar I'd ever heard."

He said the hole was above his seat. People stayed calm and put on the oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling.

"After we landed in Charleston, the pilot came out and looked up through the hole, and everybody applauded, shook his hand, a couple of people gave him hugs," Cunningham said.

It's not clear what caused the damage.

The incident occurred just four months after Southwest agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges that it operated planes that had missed required safety inspections for cracks in the fuselage.


Southwest spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said the airline inspected 200 Boeing 737-300-series jets overnight at hangars around the country and discovered no other similar problems.

"It was a walk-around visual inspection just to check for structural integrity," McInnis said.

No cancellations, delays
All those planes were put into routine service Tuesday morning, while the airliner that landed in West Virginia remained there. Representatives from the National Transportation Safety Board and the aircraft manufacturer Boeing were helping to determine cause of the hole, McInnis said.

Southwest was operating a normal schedule of flights — about 3,300 per day — with no cancellations or delays through midmorning, McInnis said.

The hobbled airliner was placed in service during the 1990s and went through "routine maintenance" this month, McInnis said.

The 137-seat 737-300 makes up about one-third of the carrier's fleet of about 540 jets, all various models of the Boeing 737.

In March, Southwest agreed to pay a $7.5 million civil penalty imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration for operating nearly 60,000 flights in 2007 on planes that had not undergone required inspections for cracks in the fuselage. About 1,450 flights took place after the FAA had notified Southwest of the missed inspections.

The settlement with the FAA also required Southwest to increase oversight at companies to which Southwest outsources maintenance work, and to give FAA inspectors more access to information used in tracking maintenance activities.

Dallas-based Southwest carries more than 100 million U.S. passengers a year, more than any other airline.


© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31902513/ns/travel-news/
 

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
40,146
16,543
Riding the baggage carousel.
unless they have x-ray vision, that walk-around visual inspection ain't gonna do ****.
I was wondering that myself, especially given that in the picture that accompanies that article, the hole is in the top of the airplane. How you find that on a walk around is beyond me.

Wasn't he behind this on behalf of his Tubby co-workers.
As an airline employee, I am all for the return of the sixties style flight attendants, blond, thin, and short skirts. It would make maintenance calls at the gate a lot more enjoyable.
 

cneums

Monkey
Jul 9, 2009
118
0
Maryland, USA
As an airline employee, I am all for the return of the sixties style flight attendants, blond, thin, and short skirts. It would make maintenance calls at the gate a lot more enjoyable.

and for the rest of us, entrance to the mile high club would be walking right down that aisle pushing that cart full of drinks...