ASA Engine Inspections Raise Questions

Posted by: Justin Bachman on April 01

Atlantic Southeast Airlines, a regional carrier for Delta, was forced to cancel flights today after grounding 60 of its 50-seat regional jets late on March 31. The airline is inspecting the GE engines used on the CRJ200s, a process that takes about an hour once they have cooled. ASA hopes to complete the inspections by April 2, spokeswoman Kate Modolo says. The company has nearly 400 daily departures from Delta’s Atlanta hub, and more than 800 overall.

For those experiencing déjà vu all over again from this news, that’s because a similar issue befell American Airlines (AMR) just a year ago when it had to cancel more than 3,000 flights to inspect wiring in its MD-80 jets. And Southwest (LUV) paid a $7.5 million fine to the government last month for failing to inspect for cracking damage on some of its 737s. The Southwest case, which led to Congressional hearings, laid bare a widespread culture of overly cozy relations between the airlines and federal safety inspectors. It also served as the catalyst behind recent changes in how the FAA, which suffered a public black eye from the episode, monitors the carriers.

The Federal Aviation Administration has not yet decided whether it will “accept” ASA’s voluntary self-disclosure on the engine inspections, agency spokeswoman Alison Duquette said Wednesday. If it does not, or accepts only part of that disclosure, the former Delta subsidiary now owned by SkyWest (SKYW) could face fines. “It’s hard to compare this case to what happened at Southwest and American because we don’t know yet,” she says. “Did they knowingly fly un-airworthy aircraft? We just don’t have the answer to that question yet.” Duquette says an answer will come in days or weeks.

The problem was uncovered March 31 during a “paperwork audit,” Modolo said. But it is not clear if the engines had been inspected, on schedule, and the documentation of that work was faulty, or if the inspections simply were not performed. One other question: Should these kinds of issues occur periodically? Granted, there are tens of thousands of planes in U.S. airlines’ fleets and hundreds of thousands of engines, all of which face numerous maintenance protocols imposed by federal authorities, plus the manufacturers and their operators. It is a colossal task, overseen by fallible humans – and yet few could argue that Americans enjoy some of the safest air travel in the history of aviation. We are fortunate that the system works as well as it does. And yet… When problems occur in 60-jet and 300-jet batches it is suprising.

In another curious recent development, the FAA essentially wiped the enforcement slate clean at Southwest, which paid a $7.5 million fine last month (down from the original $10.2 million the feds proposed a year ago) related to its failure to inspect fuselages for cracks. In a little-noticed but excellent story, the Dallas Morning News reported that the FAA ended 41 enforcement cases at Southwest as part of the settlement. The agency says Southwest’s maintenance overhauls have been extensive to the point that the issues raised by the other cases were addressed or are being fixed. “They were related to the root cause of the settlement we proposed,” Duquette said Wednesday.