The FAA has launched a safety audit of Southwest Airlines. This comes after the airline came within feet of the water while still miles from Tampa less than a month after another of the airline’s 737s descended to just over 500 feet while still 9 miles out from the Oklahoma City airport.
The airline said it had already formed a team of experts and leaders from the airline, its unions and the FAA to take a close look at its safety system.
“This group is tasked with performing an in-depth, data-driven analysis to identify any opportunities for improvement. Nothing is more important to Southwest than the safety of our customers and employees,” the airline said.
In April, a Southwest Airlines flight in Hawaii came within 400 feet of the Pacific Ocean. Last month a Southwest Airlines flight took off from a closed runway
United has just come out from under a safety audit that prevented it from putting any new planes into commercial service or inaugurating flights to new cities.
The FAA’s Office of Inspector General has previously found that the agency “has not effectively overseen Southwest Airlines’ systems for managing safety risks.”
FAA learned in 2018 that the carrier regularly and frequently communicated incorrect aircraft weight and balance data to its pilots—a violation of FAA regulations and an important safety issue. Southwest Airlines also operates aircraft in an unknown airworthiness state, including more than 150,000 flights on previously owned aircraft that did not meet U.S. aviation standards—putting 17.2 million passengers at risk.
In both cases, the carrier continues operating aircraft without ensuring compliance with regulations because FAA accepted the air carrier’s justification that the issues identified were low safety risks.
Second, FAA inspectors do not evaluate air carrier risk assessments or safety culture as part of their oversight of Southwest Airlines’ SMS. This is because FAA has not provided inspectors with guidance on how to review risk assessments or how to evaluate and oversee a carrier’s safety culture. As a result, FAA cannot provide assurance that the carrier operates at the highest degree of safety in the public’s interest, as required by law.
Since the start of the pandemic, the FAA ‘closed’ 9 of 11 recommendations to address deficiencies in monitoring Southwest Airlines safety.. Four and a half years later there are still outstanding items that the FAA has agreed are problems but have not been fixed.