Southwest Airlines' move to ground dozens of planes last Saturday, just hours after learning of possible structural problems, was an unusual move in the industry.
Typically, airlines wait for regulatory direction and manufacturer recommendations before removing planes from service. In this case, that was a tricky proposition—partly because Boeing Co. was temporarily caught off guard and regulators didn't know what initial action to take.
Government officials continue to investigate the problems that caused the fuselage of one of the carrier's aging Boeing 737 jets to rip open in midair last Friday with 117 passengers on board. But Southwest's decision to cancel hundreds of flights and delay thousands of others to conduct inspections could set a new model for such events in the industry, according to government and industry safety experts. The move allayed passenger concerns and helped the carrier adhere to its aggressive inspection timeline with more control over its own destiny, they say.
Hours after the incident, with the first morning departures looming, Southwest maintenance and engineering chief Brian Hirshman pressed the aircraft manufacturer for answers.
"We gotta start something here," he said to Boeing executives on a conference call after 1 a.m. last Saturday. Southwest officials wondered, how could a gash that was five feet long and perfectly straight, like a paper cut, have appeared in a plane that was only 15 years old?
Boeing didn't know. "We did not expect this to happen," a representative of the manufacturer told them. It was a rare acknowledgment: For decades, Boeing has made a science of accurately predicting when its metal planes would need to be inspected, and possibly repaired, for fatigue.
An examination by The Wall Street Journal of the accident and its aftermath reveals a breakdown of the system that Boeing, government regulators and airlines use to keep aging planes safe, leaving the aircraft maker stymied and regulators unsure of what to do.
Faced with the question of whether to let dozens of 737 jets fly with potential structural problems unlike any faced by the industry in decades, Southwest grounded the planes, canceling more than 620 flights and delaying 2,700 others, according to FlightStats.com.
In successfully navigating the crisis, Southwest may have charted a new course for how airlines could deal with complex safety hazards in coming years, the safety experts say.
"I give Southwest's leadership credit for not waiting until someone was pounding on them," said Robert Francis, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said.
Boeing, Southwest and regulatory officials are still sorting out exactly what went wrong, a process that's likely to take many months. In the meantime, the FAA is rethinking maintenance requirements for all types of older jets while carriers around the world test for hazardous cracks in nearly 500 other 737s built between 1993 and 2000.
"We support the steps Southwest took in the hours immediately after the incident and we continue to work closely with the airline, the NTSB and the FAA to determine the root cause of the incident," a Boeing spokesman said. An FAA spokeswoman said the agency is working with Southwest and Boeing, but declined to discuss specifics of the investigation.
Mr. Hirshman, a 43-year-old former airline mechanic, didn't quite know what awaited him when he dialed into an urgent conference call from his home office last Friday night.
On the call, Mr. Hirshman heard Southwest's director of operations say he had spoken with staff in Yuma, Ariz., where an hour earlier a Boeing 737-300 aircraft had made an emergency landing at a military base. The problem: The aircraft had a fuselage rupture.
On a flight from Phoenix to Sacramento, a section of the 737's fuselage suddenly peeled open while the aircraft cruised at 34,000 feet. Passengers later said it sounded like a gunshot. None of the 122 people on board was seriously injured.
Around 7:30 p.m., Mr. Hirshman briefed an FAA official on the crisis and then drove to Southwest's headquarters where he joined about two dozen people in the company's emergency center. Southwest Chief Executive Gary Kelly phoned in from out of town.
Mr. Hirshman sat down, opened an e-mail photo attachment and caught his first glimpse of the rupture. The five-foot-long rupture was just three or four feet above the passenger windows. The aircraft's inner structure had been ripped open seemingly in one explosive burst, with the break crossing three separate vertical pieces—called tear straps—intended to keep the skin intact.
Typically, after an incident like the rupture, an airline researches its own maintenance records to see if any checks were missed or done improperly. Following that plan, a team under Mr. Hirshman reviewed the history of the damaged 737, which had more than 39,000 flights, verifying that the airline had conducted a variety of structural inspections on the 737's crown, near the location where the fuselage ruptured. They found nothing unusual.
"We didn't understand what we had," Mr. Hirshman said later.
After an incident, Boeing typically provides detailed analysis of the specific aircraft model and information about experiences of other carriers with similar issues.
In this case, three Boeing representatives on the phone early Saturday morning said they couldn't explain yet why the fuselage had split open.
In an attempt to deal with Southwest's concerns, a Boeing engineer suggested the airline start inspecting the fleet with two tests: one to look for shallow scratches caused by hand tools used by workers during routine painting, and another to look for hidden "subsurface cracks." The inspections would take 16 hours per plane.
After getting off the phone with Boeing, still unsure of what went wrong, two Southwest executives decided they should ground all 79 Boeing 737s. "I don't think we have enough information," to keep them in the air, Mr. Hirshman recalls saying.
They called the CEO and explained that partly because Boeing hadn't been able to pinpoint a cause, the Southwest executives were recommending the preemptive grounding.
"I agree with that," Mr. Kelly said without hesitation.
By mid-afternoon Saturday, Southwest had conducted the two inspections on more than a dozen planes.
Then came bad news. Boeing said the recommended inspections weren't the right ones. It now was recommending something different.
By Tuesday, the airline had finished tests on all 79 aircraft. Five were found to have "small, subsurface cracks" and needed repair. On Thursday, Southwest said four of the five planes with subsurface cracks could return back to service as early as Saturday, pending FAA approval.
Boeing publicly acknowledged technical missteps. It said it knew certain older versions of its 737 aircraft could face cracking problems, but had thought the risks wouldn't emerge until much later in a plane's life. The company had advised airlines that certain older 737s could make 60,000 flights before they needed to undergo detailed inspections of the skin sections.
On Tuesday, however, Boeing said it had erred and that, as "a precautionary measure," it now recommends inspections when the planes reach 30,000 flights, half the original number.
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