Southwest Allegedly Cut Corners and Pilots Struggled to Get Planes to Take Off
A new report made by a Senate committee as part of an indictment of the Federal Aviation Administration’s oversight of the safety of America’s airline passengers, shows that Southwest cut corners and put lives at risk.
Southwest Airlines allegedly jeopardized the safety of thousands of flights by forcing pilots to fly beyond the limits of safety recommended by Boeing for operating the airline’s fleet of 737 aircraft.
Serious safety concerns about Southwest were raised by a whistleblower, a veteran former Naval pilot, Jeffrey Rees, who served as one of the FAA’s safety inspectors for the airline. His testimony focused on a program called Performance Weight and Balance System (PWB), that is part of a critical pilot checklist before takeoff, that Southwest introduced in 2017.
The report says that PWB’s implementation at Southwest Airlines according to Inspector Rees, is designed to make full use of the aircraft’s performance in order to save fuel and allow for more cargo on the plane. To accomplish these objections, safety buffers previously incorporated in the calculations were removed. This means that Southwest Airlines flight crews must now perform at a much higher level due to a reduced margin for error.
Mr. Rees cites an incident in which a Southwest Airlines pilot reached out to him claiming that the PWB on their plane had calculated a stopping margin of zero feet in several instances. That means that if the pilot delayed the decision to reject, or was too slow to execute the reject procedure by even a fraction of a second, the plane would run off the end of the runway.
He also cited cases where pilots had difficulty getting their aircraft airborne and, during the takeoff run, had to “aggressively use electronic trim switches” to get off the runway. FAA whistleblowers state that the resulting trim settings often exceeded manufacturer tolerances for takeoff. The nose of the airplane was pitched up to a point where it would be close to inducing an aerodynamic stall, which would end with the airplane plunging to a crash. Committee staff confirmed with whistleblowers and several experienced pilots that this is an extremely dangerous situation.
The 100 page report cites many more cases with testimonies from experts, pilots, and other whistleblowers. You can read it here.
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Well this is alarming!