Southwest suspends vendor over faulty parts in Boeing flap
Southwest Airlines Co., the largest low-fare carrier, suspended a maintenance vendor linked to the use of unauthorized parts in 82 Boeing Co. 737 aircraft.
The airline already replaced the parts -- hinge and actuator brackets -- on 50 planes and is working with "all available vendors and resources" to make enough new pieces, said Beth Harbin, a spokeswoman for Dallas-based Southwest.
The airline and the Federal Aviation Administration resumed talks today on how to deal with the issue of the parts and the airplanes still flying with them. While the airline, the FAA and Boeing have said the parts don't present a safety risk, U.S. regulations prohibit planes from being flown with pieces made without federal certification.
"They have, albeit potentially inadvertently, violated the regulations by using unauthorized parts," Jon Ash, president of consulting firm InterVistas-GA2 in Washington, said in an interview. "At the end of the day, I suspect they'll receive a fine. That is a given."
The FAA hasn't decided on a course of action for Southwest, said Lynn Lunsford, an agency spokesman. Should the FAA and the carrier fail to reach an agreement by tomorrow, any Southwest jet flown with the unauthorized parts would violate a federal order and the airline may face a fine of as much as $25,000 a flight, Lunsford said.
"We are currently considering a number of possible options and are working to reach a decision as soon as possible," he said. "It would be premature to speculate about the outcome."
The problem was discovered Aug. 21, after an FAA inspector monitoring work at a Southwest maintenance subcontractor found irregularities in paperwork for some parts. The inspector determined the subcontractor made hinge fittings for a system that moves hot air away from flaps on the rear of wings when they're extended, work it wasn't authorized by the FAA to do.
Southwest suspended D-Velco Aviation Services of Phoenix, the company that hired the subcontractor, as one of its maintenance vendors, Harbin said. The subcontractor that made the fittings has not been named. The 82 planes represent 15 percent of Southwest's 544-jet fleet.
The inquiry focuses more attention on aircraft at Southwest. The airline in March agreed to pay a $7.5 million fine, the largest penalty collected by the FAA, for flying jets without fuselage inspections in 2006 and 2007. In July, a foot- wide hole opened in the fuselage of a Southwest jet, forcing an emergency landing.
AMR Corp.'s American Airlines scrubbed 3,300 flights and stranded 360,000 passengers last year after the FAA required wiring inspection and repairs on 300 Boeing MD-80s. American grounded almost half its fleet after the FAA found the airline hadn't secured wiring bundles in accordance with an agency directive.
At Southwest, "the safety of the parts is not the issue," Harbin said. "What is at issue is that there is no established protocol to remedy a situation where you have perfectly safe parts, deemed so by the aircraft manufacturer, that have to be removed and replaced."
Because the parts are no threat to the airline's safety, the FAA probably will give the company "a reasonable period of time" to replace the unauthorized parts, Ash said. The most recent issue shouldn't raise alarms about Southwest's safety, he said. With 544 planes, such incidents will occur "from time to time," Ash said.
The airline and FAA began meeting Aug. 22, with the agency allowing Southwest to continue to fly the planes for at least 10 days while a solution was found.
The FAA may decide that the parts need to be replaced immediately or that they can remain in use until the normal schedule for replacement, Lunsford said. It's too early to say whether Southwest might face fines over the components, he said.
Southwest fell 33 cents, or 3.9 percent, to $8.18 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have declined 5.1 percent this year.