Southwest oopsie - ‘woman partially sucked out of window’

Palmpilot said:
The number of posts.
Click to expand...

Bingo, I'm done, if anyone else wants to ask me a question about this, post it, then scroll back through my posts and find your answer. I've pretty much answered about every thing I can answer about this here. Take care.
 
Too many posts and too much noise in this thread so I might have missed this but who has read the actual AD and what to you think about the verbiage, what it says and what it doesn’t say? I have a couple of gripes about it so to speak.
 
PaulS said:
This has gotten so convoluted.... tell me the flaw in my information/ reasoning?
Click to expand...
You have concluded that the system failed based, apparently, on the false premise that the system is intended to prevent anyone from dying. It isn't. It's designed to keep deaths below some acceptable threshold. That may seem icky, but it is what it is. Engineering and maintenance resources are finite. The resources that go to these inspections/repairs will not go somewhere else. People might die as a result. More? Fewer? We might only know in hindsight.
 
PaulS said:
“This should not happen and we want to find out why it happened so we make sure the preventative measures are put in place,” said Robert Sumwalt, NTSB Chairman.
Click to expand...

I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all, but his agency isn’t tasked with anything but recommending possible solutions, legally.

He’s way out of his swim lane if he thinks he implements “preventative measures”. That’s not NTSB’s role. That’s FAA’s role.

It also insinuates a) that approved measures weren’t already defined by government, they were... and b) that he’s got the answer already, and he doesn’t.

Furthermore NTSB is only one of many in determining acceptable risk. Their answer is a foregone conclusion most of the time... it’s easy to recommend everyone else do everything better.

Saying nice sound bites like that on TV is, however, exactly what NTSB does in their government PR role. Calm the herd. “Shhhh. Shhhh. This won’t happen again. Go back to sleep.”

He should have stopped at the word “happened”. It’s FAA’s role to handle his last sentence. It’s not even his job. Nor does every stakeholder necessarily agree with his risk assessment.

It’s about as connected to reality as NTSB suggesting no more CFIT accidents should happen. Platitudes are nice.

Society needs someone to proclaim all the things a society does for convenience are “safe”. That’s what he did. Doesn’t mean he’s right or telling the truth.

GenPop doesn’t want to hear:

“We’re operating aluminum tubing at high speeds in the stratosphere. A lot of it. People are going to die every so often. We’ll see if we can slow that down but we’ll never stop it. We’ll investigate these two events and see how they relate to the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of flights with identical high speed aluminum sky tubing, and see if anyone is doing anything dumb. Pretty unlikely considering the numbers we have right now.”

The sheep much prefer he lies. They pay him to lie, even.

Let me know when he implements his fix that stops all bad things from happening inside all CFM turbofans. I’ll be quite impressed.

He’ll be long gone and the next board member will say the exact same thing after the next death.

Using it as evidence that perfection is the goal, is hopeful and emotion based, but not realistic in the real world of aeronautical engineering. Airplanes have always pushed the boundaries of engineering knowledge.

I’d take flying a CFM turbofan powered airplane any day of the week over my piston powered one, given the resources to do so. Whining that operators of either one can just toss economics out the window in the name of “safety” is kinda useless. I’d be a hell of a lot safer teaching students in something turbine powered over piston powered.

Time for all the fight schools to buy T-6 Texan IIs! LOL.

Life is risk. Get aboard a 500 MPH aluminum stratosphere tube, you’ve accepted some.
 
If you want to ground any aircraft until they’ve been inspected because of this, logically, you are calling for the banning of commercial carriage. There is just no way to justify stopping flights because of this one woman dying. Heck, we don’t even actually know her cause of death.
 
Ok boys ( and girls if there are any in this thread), I said I'm done with the bickering, so if you want to rehash what's already been posted, feel free to go for it per my out post above.

That said, I'm still keenly interested what happened here and what is being done to resolve it. I've found some pretty informative postings elsewhere, one is a twitter posting by SWA clarifying what it has been up to since last year and what it is doing now, supposedly posted to counter some of the press they have been receiving. Without getting back into the bickering, I will say that this post has softened my position on SWA and their culpability in this accident, I suggest you read it if you haven't already. I hope the link works.

https://twitter.com/jonostrower/status/987492158755094528

(Click on the text part of the tweet from Jon, then right arrow to read the whole memo.)




This is a timeline of events, it had some things that I hadn't read before.

http://aerossurance.com/safety-management/uncontained-cfm56-failure-b737/
 
wsuffa said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
Click to expand...

We had work on this in the Biz School in the Organizational Behavior Class. Interesting discussions by people with engineering, liberal arts, law, business and other backgrounds. In each situation, there was a show of hands for various choices and then discussions as to why your choice was made. Most choices were very similar among the group.

One of the lawyers in the class made no choice in the first situation. When asked why, he said he would defend anyone prosecuted. Broke up the place.

Cheers
 
Watching this one from the outside, it seems to me that you guys are being a bit unreasonable in your criticism of @PaulS. I totally see his point - And it looks to me like he's not the emotional one here.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Watching this one from the outside, it seems to me that you guys are being a bit unreasonable in your criticism of @PaulS. I totally see his point - And it looks to me like he's not the emotional one here.
Click to expand...
...aaaand another round we go!!!

giphy.gif
 
I took a look at this 42 pager just to see what the discussion had descended to... I was not disappointed ‍♂️‍♂️


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Watching this one from the outside, it seems to me that you guys are being a bit unreasonable in your criticism of @PaulS. I totally see his point - And it looks to me like he's not the emotional one here.
Click to expand...

Want to translate?

As best as I can tell he wants SWA to be better at making engines they didn’t make and that multiple other carriers operate and all have said the same things about to regulators.

Engines will billions of hours on them.

SWA is as likely to just have been unlucky to have two of them grenade and one trigger a decompression that killed a passenger (we haven’t seen any evidence the engine shrapnel itself harmed the passenger) as to have some sort of systemic problem.

Even regulators were reluctant to require anything special of the operators of the things prior to a single accidental death. If they thought there was a real systemic problem the carriers don’t really get a say in them grounding whatever they want grounded.

Is there really any way this couldn’t be described as a mountain out of a molehill?

As far as your text forum emotional clairvoyance goes, tell me what emotion I’m feeling right now. This should be entertaining.
 
Since this thread will likely soon fade into the ether, I want add a sort of summary of things that have occurred to me reading and posting.

The most interesting thing to me is that this is almost certainly an event caused by a defect that could be in almost any 737 Next Gen airframe powered by CFM56-7B Engines as evidenced by the applicability of the CFM recommendations and the AD. Unfortunately by whatever odds, it happened twice to SWA and was the cause for several and repeated complaints that SWA was deficient in addressing the problem and this deficiency caused a death of one of the 2.5 Million people flying on airlines in US Airspace that day. Tragic loss but it could have been American or any of the 60 some odd other operators around the world. A complaint against SWA included terming it “a foolhardy bean counter mistake” (Post 269)

Putting aside any discussions of FAA certifications, design deficiencies, maintenance practices or anything else as these can be the subject of legitimate technical disagreement, the fact is the airframe and engines and their maintenance procedures have been approved by the FAA. How SWA reacted to the first failure was essentially identical, if not superior, to all the other commercial operators of the same combination of airframe and engine had they experienced the failure and is very typical and in my experience how such problems have been handled by the FAA and airlines.

It mirrors similar actions that I had been directly involved with when failures in USAF engines caused a Class A mishap (loss of life, serious injury or damage of, IIRC, $1Million). I have never been hampered in any engineering investigation of these incidents, and barring operational requirements such as to support combat, the technical recommendations with an assessment of potential risks have been adopted. In conversations with the FAA when I have been asked to help on technical matters, they have said the airlines have a safety first approach and technical analysis and risk assessment are the bedrock of the final decision.

The bottom line is SWA isn’t any different from, and in someways superior to mainline and other airlines in the USA. The same process approach can be said of almost all European Airlines. In fact, the CFM56 was initially certified by the French DGAC, their certification agency, back in 1979. This was because the original GE partner in CFM was SNECMA, a French engine firm. I attended a 4 day review and hardware inspection of the CFM56 Certification Program in Paris in 1979 and the certification program was essentially identical to the FAA process.

SWA did not deserve the approbation of being deficient in their response. It seems to me that the “foolhardy bean counter mistake“ wasn’t one, unless the entire civilian aviation industry and their government regulators made some mistake which in my opinion, they didn’t. The odds unfortunately caught up with the passenger. I have made similar recommendations before and the results were as expected. I’ve a made a few that did not go as planned and I’m ok with that since the only way to guarantee perfection was to permanently ground the USAF. (Which might make the US Navy and the US Army happy)

Flying, even commercially, is not risk free and unfortunately a fine lady died. That does not negate the outstanding record of SWA and the entire US Commercial Aviation Industry who followed the same process that has resulted an amazing safety record.

Cheers
 
denverpilot said:
Want to translate?

As best as I can tell he wants SWA to be better at making engines they didn’t make and that multiple other carriers operate and all have said the same things about to regulators.
Click to expand...

The first time this happened, it was the luck of the draw. Freak accident. Could have happened to anyone, right? So, inspect the engines and let's move on. But that's not really what happened.

What happened is that Southwest, and most of the other carriers operating that engine, pushed back on the proposed AD, asking for an increased timeframe to comply with the inspections. Was that a "foolhardy bean counter mistake?" Well, not foolhardy from the bean counter's perspective - That's a bean counter's job, and that's the reason an airline or any other company exists: To make a profit. But, the airlines are in a risky business that has been made very safe by the regulators. For reasons we're not privy to, possibly including the beancounter pushback, the proposed AD was not finalized and the whole matter was put on the back burner...

... Until now.

Now, we have a dead person, which raises the level of scrutiny. We also have the second event occurring on the same airline, which is a statistical improbability. Near as I can tell, there are well over 17,000 CFM56-3/-7B engines installed on 737s worldwide, and Southwest operates about 1400 of them total. So, only about 1 in 13 of these engines is on a Southwest plane. The first "event", it's a dart throw. Could happen to anyone. The second event, on the same airline, in those proportions, means we're talking less than 1% chance that this is just the luck of the draw. While I have no reason to doubt Spike or anyone else talking about Southwest's maintenance being good, even good organizations make mistakes - and this does, IMO, also warrant increased scrutiny of Southwest's particular treatment of these engines.

Finally, while people say that even if the AD took effect as originally proposed, the second event would have occurred within the original 12 months allotted for the inspections and thus may not have been caught, it would have been most of the way through the 12 months and Southwest management surely would not have allowed planes to be grounded at the end of the 12 months for lack of inspection, so we can assume that if this particular fan blade's defect is something that could have been caught with the proposed inspection, there's probably an 80%-90% chance that this engine *would* have gone through the inspection already and that this passenger would still be alive.

We didn't get to this level of safety in the airline business by not looking at these things. We got here by examining these things in great detail and learning from them. Let's keep that up, not say "well it was a freak accident, and it only killed one person." What if that one person was YOUR wife, or your kid's mother?

As far as your text forum emotional clairvoyance goes, tell me what emotion I’m feeling right now. This should be entertaining.
Click to expand...

I didn't specify an emotion. :p But Paul has brought up some good points and it doesn't seem like people are talking about those points.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
The first time this happened, it was the luck of the draw. Freak accident. Could have happened to anyone, right? So, inspect the engines and let's move on. But that's not really what happened.

What happened is that Southwest, and most of the other carriers operating that engine, pushed back on the proposed AD, asking for an increased timeframe to comply with the inspections. Was that a "foolhardy bean counter mistake?" Well, not foolhardy from the bean counter's perspective - That's a bean counter's job, and that's the reason an airline or any other company exists: To make a profit. But, the airlines are in a risky business that has been made very safe by the regulators. For reasons we're not privy to, possibly including the beancounter pushback, the proposed AD was not finalized and the whole matter was put on the back burner...

... Until now.

Now, we have a dead person, which raises the level of scrutiny. We also have the second event occurring on the same airline, which is a statistical improbability. Near as I can tell, there are well over 17,000 CFM56-3/-7B engines installed on 737s worldwide, and Southwest operates about 1400 of them total. So, only about 1 in 13 of these engines is on a Southwest plane. The first "event", it's a dart throw. Could happen to anyone. The second event, on the same airline, in those proportions, means we're talking less than 1% chance that this is just the luck of the draw. While I have no reason to doubt Spike or anyone else talking about Southwest's maintenance being good, even good organizations make mistakes - and this does, IMO, also warrant increased scrutiny of Southwest's particular treatment of these engines.

Finally, while people say that even if the AD took effect as originally proposed, the second event would have occurred within the original 12 months allotted for the inspections and thus may not have been caught, it would have been most of the way through the 12 months and Southwest management surely would not have allowed planes to be grounded at the end of the 12 months for lack of inspection, so we can assume that if this particular fan blade's defect is something that could have been caught with the proposed inspection, there's probably an 80%-90% chance that this engine *would* have gone through the inspection already and that this passenger would still be alive.

We didn't get to this level of safety in the airline business by not looking at these things. We got here by examining these things in great detail and learning from them. Let's keep that up, not say "well it was a freak accident, and it only killed one person." What if that one person was YOUR wife, or your kid's mother?



I didn't specify an emotion. :p But Paul has brought up some good points and it doesn't seem like people are talking about those points.
Click to expand...
Well you are making the same connection made earlier... something is special about sw since both failures happened at south west. That’s not a sound conclusion. The probability of any one individual winning the lottery is way smaller than 1%. Someone wins on a very regular basis. I know someone that has won twice. Using your logic I could make a safe conclusion that my friend is a cheater and fixed the lottery. In fact they were just lucky. Just like south west was unlucky.
 
Tarheelpilot said:
Well you are making the same connection made earlier... something is special about sw since both failures happened at south west. That’s not a sound conclusion. The probability of any one individual winning the lottery is way smaller than 1%. Someone wins on a very regular basis. I know someone that has won twice. Using your logic I could make a safe conclusion that my friend is a cheater and fixed the lottery. In fact they were just lucky. Just like south west was unlucky.
Click to expand...

Improbable events do happen - But only rarely. And I didn't say that the second event happening on Southwest is an absolute indicator that something wrong is happening at Southwest. They may just be very unlucky. However, chances are that there is some sort of failure on their part as well, since now the "thing that never happens" has happened there twice.

It may come to pass that they were unlucky - But we need to look and make sure instead of saying it was a fluke, a second time.
 
well....now that sharp sticks have been applied....the lawyers will begin the deep pocket bleeding process. Now, let that be a lesson. o_O
 
flyingcheesehead said:
The first time this happened, it was the luck of the draw. Freak accident. Could have happened to anyone, right? So, inspect the engines and let's move on. But that's not really what happened.

What happened is that Southwest, and most of the other carriers operating that engine, pushed back on the proposed AD, asking for an increased timeframe to comply with the inspections.
Click to expand...

You were right up until here, then you went down the bean counter path. All of those carriers literally said they CAN’T FIND the things that needed to be inspected now, twice. The processes approved by the regulators didn’t have blade tracking as a requirement so it’s a real world problem more than a bean counting problem.

And... the regulators were squarely on their side until it became politically expedient not to be. Partly because they don’t want to ever admit their approved processes have flaws just like any process always does. It doesn’t play as well to media.

Sit on it and wait for a second event was clearly happening at all levels, not just the carriers. The regulators could have ignored the “push back” at any time. Their cost/benefit analysis was more bean counter based than the carriers, but theirs was counting public opinion, not money. They aren’t money motivated.

The carriers are still more than happy to hang the regulators out to dry on this one. “Ground the fleet. You know what we will say on TV about it... and you know it’s true...”

There’s a lot more than simple “corporate greed” going on here. And yes, it’s still a minuscule event in terms of engineering failures compared to the reality of how much time is on all of those engines.

The practical solution is, beef up the containment/armor toward the fuselage, at a weight penalty, raise the ticket prices a few bucks, and move on. One less window seat. Unless someone can prove a flight control threat vector from the exceedingly occasional engine shrapnel.

The engine didn’t kill the passenger directly as far as we know. The pressurization loss probably did.

And yes it’s a kludge what I proposed above. You can say it. But the digging for this blade thing will take a long time judging by the carrier’s responses.

Overloading the maintenance facilities won’t lead to significantly more safety on this one. Either to inspect everything or to armor up the fuselage and critical wing structure.

Keeping the flingy bits inside a — guaranteed to grenade every so often — engine instead of letting them out, is the best solution, but imagine the time it’d take to get THAT certified through the bureaucracy...

All those safety improvements you’ve mentioned took that long. Decades to implement some of them.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
... Near as I can tell, there are well over 17,000 CFM56-3/-7B engines installed on 737s worldwide, and Southwest operates about 1400 of them total. So, only about 1 in 13 of these engines is on a Southwest plane. The first "event", it's a dart throw. Could happen to anyone. The second event, on the same airline, in those proportions, means we're talking less than 1% chance that this is just the luck of the draw. ...
Click to expand...
I really don't have a dog in this fight, but I have to comment on the fuzzy thinking here. So of the 17,000 engines, suppose that 15,600 of them were still in crates. Then the probability that SW would see the second failure would be 100%, through no fault of SW's.

The point is that to do that kind of calculation you have to do something besides a nose count. You need at least base your calculation a parameter related to the stress (cycles or whatever) the engines see. The other thing that you have to recognize is if failures are random, the probability of a failure is the same whether the airline has had a previous failure or not. Statistical clusters happen all the time, to the great joy of personal injury lawyers. This is @Tarheelpilot's point.

The unanswered question at this point is whether the failures are random or not. If random and if life is fair, SW is off the hook. Unfortunately for SW, life is not fair.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
We also have the second event occurring on the same airline, which is a statistical improbability. Near as I can tell, there are well over 17,000 CFM56-3/-7B engines installed on 737s worldwide, and Southwest operates about 1400 of them total. So, only about 1 in 13 of these engines is on a Southwest plane. The first "event", it's a dart throw. Could happen to anyone. The second event, on the same airline, in those proportions, means we're talking less than 1% chance that this is just the luck of the draw. While I have no reason to doubt Spike or anyone else talking about Southwest's maintenance being good, even good organizations make mistakes - and this does, IMO, also warrant increased scrutiny of Southwest's particular treatment of these engines.
Click to expand...
Now we delve into statistics, which really can be used to argue any point one wishes to make. "lies, damn lies, and statistics".

From what I can tell, and info that's been released, there are about 14,000 -7B engines out there (we don't know how many are actually in use), so WN has about 10% of them. There are about 680 engines affected by the order (that is, they have more than 30,000 cycles). We don't know how many of those WN has. We also don't know of other incidents involving the engines and fan blades - with roughly 60 operators worldwide, we may well not hear of other incidents. Further, with that number of operators, the likelihood that WN is the largest (or certainly one of the largest) operators of the engines is exceedingly high - if so, then WN would statistically be more likely to have more incidents than any other specific operator had even a single incident. By that measure, it's a higher likelihood that this is luck of the draw.

It's also not clear to me whether or not WN has more of the high-cycle engines than anyone else. Certainly, they were one of the earlier customers.

We could also like at this a different way. Assuming that 90% of the engine cycles were for revenue flights, and each flight had 120 people on board, then 30,000 times .9 times 120 is 3.24 million customers carried during the "life" of the engine (ore engine blade) so far. If we take the 680 affected engines, then that number grows much, much more. While the loss of a single life is tragic, the fact is that the odds of someone losing their life in a plane in this manner are infinitesimally low. I will still take my chances in a plane powered by these engines over highway traffic (or even GA) any day. YMMV.

Further, since WN outsources heavy engine maintenance to GE (partner in Safran), the scrutiny probably ought to be greater on GE than WN. It's not like Delta, which does much of the heavy maintenance in-house, WN has outsourced to the manufacturer (or manufacturer's rep). I also don't know what part Boeing played in the design of the nacelle for the engine (the cowling was certainly Boeing). The fan blade itself is on Safran/GE, but the cowling coming off may be on Boeing. Again, something that the NTSB and FAA need to work out.

So I agree that the goal is/should be zero deaths and zero failures. But I have yet to see anything conclusive that points the finger to Southwest for their maintenance practices. You may feel differently, and that's OK, but statistics alone don't tell the whole story.
 
airdale said:
I really don't have a dog in this fight, but I have to comment on the fuzzy thinking here. So of the 17,000 engines, suppose that 15,600 of them were still in crates. Then the probability that SW would see the second failure would be 100%, through no fault of SW's.
Click to expand...

True - But airlines don't go buying engines to drop them in crates, so I think the assumption that the proportion of each airline's engines that are mounted and flying on airplanes is close enough to be insignificant to the calculation is a safe one.

The point is that to do that kind of calculation you have to do something besides a nose count. You need at least base your calculation a parameter related to the stress (cycles or whatever) the engines see. The other thing that you have to recognize is if failures are random, the probability of a failure is the same whether the airline has had a previous failure or not. Statistical clusters happen all the time, to the great joy of personal injury lawyers.
Click to expand...

True, but we don't have the data on that yet. I'm sure both the regulators and the airlines are busy gathering that as we speak, and we may see the cycle requirement of the AD change as they learn more.

Also, regarding "statistical clusters" this is the same as flipping a coin twice. If the coin comes up tails the first time, the probability of it coming up tails again the second time is still 50%. However, that does not mean that the probability of the coin coming up tails twice in a row is 50%.

*Once the first failure occurred*, the chances of it happening to Southwest again were the same as the chances of it happening to Southwest in the first place. However, that does not mean that the chances of it happening to Southwest twice are the same as it happening to Southwest once. We're not looking at this one particular occurrence in a vacuum, we're looking at the wider timeframe that includes TWO failures at Southwest.
 
wsuffa said:
From what I can tell, and info that's been released, there are about 14,000 -7B engines out there (we don't know how many are actually in use), so WN has about 10% of them. There are about 680 engines affected by the order (that is, they have more than 30,000 cycles). We don't know how many of those WN has. We also don't know of other incidents involving the engines and fan blades - with roughly 60 operators worldwide, we may well not hear of other incidents. Further, with that number of operators, the likelihood that WN is the largest (or certainly one of the largest) operators of the engines is exceedingly high - if so, then WN would statistically be more likely to have more incidents than any other specific operator had even a single incident. By that measure, it's a higher likelihood that this is luck of the draw.

It's also not clear to me whether or not WN has more of the high-cycle engines than anyone else. Certainly, they were one of the earlier customers.

We could also like at this a different way. Assuming that 90% of the engine cycles were for revenue flights, and each flight had 120 people on board, then 30,000 times .9 times 120 is 3.24 million customers carried during the "life" of the engine (ore engine blade) so far. If we take the 680 affected engines, then that number grows much, much more. While the loss of a single life is tragic, the fact is that the odds of someone losing their life in a plane in this manner are infinitesimally low. I will still take my chances in a plane powered by these engines over highway traffic (or even GA) any day. YMMV.
Click to expand...

I like the way you think, Bill, and I agree.

Further, since WN outsources heavy engine maintenance to GE (partner in Safran), the scrutiny probably ought to be greater on GE than WN. It's not like Delta, which does much of the heavy maintenance in-house, WN has outsourced to the manufacturer (or manufacturer's rep). I also don't know what part Boeing played in the design of the nacelle for the engine (the cowling was certainly Boeing). The fan blade itself is on Safran/GE, but the cowling coming off may be on Boeing. Again, something that the NTSB and FAA need to work out.
Click to expand...

Yes - And this is likely to get more interesting before it's all over.

So I agree that the goal is/should be zero deaths and zero failures. But I have yet to see anything conclusive that points the finger to Southwest for their maintenance practices. You may feel differently, and that's OK, but statistics alone don't tell the whole story.
Click to expand...

Certainly not - But they might tell us one of the chapters of the book that we should read. ;)
 
flyingcheesehead said:
The first time this happened, it was the luck of the draw. Freak accident. Could have happened to anyone, right? So, inspect the engines and let's move on. But that's not really what happened.

What happened is that Southwest, and most of the other carriers operating that engine, pushed back on the proposed AD, asking for an increased timeframe to comply with the inspections. Was that a "foolhardy bean counter mistake?" Well, not foolhardy from the bean counter's perspective - That's a bean counter's job, and that's the reason an airline or any other company exists: To make a profit. But, the airlines are in a risky business that has been made very safe by the regulators. For reasons we're not privy to, possibly including the beancounter pushback, the proposed AD was not finalized and the whole matter was put on the back burner...

... Until now.

Now, we have a dead person, which raises the level of scrutiny. We also have the second event occurring on the same airline, which is a statistical improbability. Near as I can tell, there are well over 17,000 CFM56-3/-7B engines installed on 737s worldwide, and Southwest operates about 1400 of them total. So, only about 1 in 13 of these engines is on a Southwest plane. The first "event", it's a dart throw. Could happen to anyone. The second event, on the same airline, in those proportions, means we're talking less than 1% chance that this is just the luck of the draw. While I have no reason to doubt Spike or anyone else talking about Southwest's maintenance being good, even good organizations make mistakes - and this does, IMO, also warrant increased scrutiny of Southwest's particular treatment of these engines.

Finally, while people say that even if the AD took effect as originally proposed, the second event would have occurred within the original 12 months allotted for the inspections and thus may not have been caught, it would have been most of the way through the 12 months and Southwest management surely would not have allowed planes to be grounded at the end of the 12 months for lack of inspection, so we can assume that if this particular fan blade's defect is something that could have been caught with the proposed inspection, there's probably an 80%-90% chance that this engine *would* have gone through the inspection already and that this passenger would still be alive.

We didn't get to this level of safety in the airline business by not looking at these things. We got here by examining these things in great detail and learning from them. Let's keep that up, not say "well it was a freak accident, and it only killed one person." What if that one person was YOUR wife, or your kid's mother?



I didn't specify an emotion. :p But Paul has brought up some good points and it doesn't seem like people are talking about those points.
Click to expand...
According to SW, their inspections were more effective than what the proposed AD called for. They inspected all high-cycle blades last year and started a program of inspecting every blade every 3,000 cycles. Their inspection program already exceeded the new AD.
 
Lindberg said:
According to SW, their inspections were more effective than what the proposed AD called for. They inspected all high-cycle blades last year and started a program of inspecting every blade every 3,000 cycles. Their inspection program already exceeded the new AD.
Click to expand...
No way that’s true. Southwest clearly favored profit over safety. It’s obvious to anyone not emotionally invested in their love affair with southwest that it’s a southwest problem. Lol
 
Lindberg said:
According to SW, their inspections were more effective than what the proposed AD called for. They inspected all high-cycle blades last year and started a program of inspecting every blade every 3,000 cycles. Their inspection program already exceeded the new AD.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Does it exceed the new AD too? How many cycles do they start with? Did the most recent engine have those inspections?
 
Tarheelpilot said:
No way that’s true. Southwest clearly favored profit over safety. It’s obvious to anyone not emotionally invested in their love affair with southwest that it’s a southwest problem. Lol
Click to expand...

What Lindberg posted was new information to me... And I'm glad to hear it. Carry on.
 
Last edited:
So I have been doing a little research about this and had a few questions that I thought maybe you guys could answer for me - How far out was the lady sucked out? did she die from the explosion or from being partly sucked out of the window?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top