Southwest Airlines Grounds Some Planes

• Southwest Airlines has one of the best safety records of ANY commercial airline.
  
  
• Southwest flies a fleet of only one type of aircraft – the Boeing 737 (although various models and ages make up the total fleet of over 500 aircraft).
• Southwest Airlines airplanes have traditionally had one of the highest resale values in the industry. Southwest has one of the youngest fleets, with an average airplane age of less than 9 years. There's a major U.S. airline with over 100 DC-9s, (they stopped being manufactured in 1983), so those planes are at least 25 years old (and with the various model types we know that most are much older than that).
• Southwest Airlines grounded some of its fleet (between 41 and 44 aircraft) today, March 12, 2008 to determine if "further" inspections are needed.

Some things that are not clear:

• We know that Southwest missed mandatory inspections of some aircraft and alerted the FAA to that fact in March 2007. After making that announcement to the FAA they began the inspection process. The time frame in which those late inspections occurred is still not absolutely clear.
• We also know, and Southwest admits, that un-inspected aircraft were used on some flights. It "appears" that some of these flights (a relatively small percentage) even occurred after Southwest realized that the inspection dates had been missed.
• Southwest advises that the FAA knew all of this and still allowed the flights to continue. Unconfirmed comments from the FAA indicate that a further inquiry into their own processes is needed. Rumors that the FAA inspectors and Southwest's own inspectors were too "chummy" are just that… rumors.
• Southwest says that Boeing advised that the issue requiring inspections never compromised the fleet's safety.
• It's not currently known how long these safety inspections will take, and if repairs are needed what effect that will have. Linda Rutherford, spokesperson for Southwest Airlines, says that the airline expects minimal disruptions to passengers as a result. And a late-breaking release from Southwest advises that they hope to have all inspections completed by this evening.

We certainly hope so, with Spring Break starting in just a few days and Easter Weekend the following week, we'll need Southwest to be operating at full capacity.

We know that the FAA dropped the ball on this one, and perhaps so did Southwest Airlines. But Southwest took a cautious route once any ambiguity in the inspection process was revealed. We are more convinced than ever that Southwest is committed to safety. And we now know that all of their aircraft have had inspections. What we don’t know is how many other airlines have had their entire fleet recently inspected.

Tom Parsons, CEO and Founder of Bestfares.com (and a multi-million mile flyer), when asked if he would fly Southwest Airlines right now said… "In a New York minute."

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