Federal report faults Southwest and FAA on safety

Southwest continues to fly airplanes with safety concerns while federal officials do a poor job overseeing the airline, a government watchdog said Tuesday. The airline has flown more than 150,000 flights on 88 jets it bought on the used-plane market and which had unconfirmed maintenance histories, the Transportation Department’s inspector general said in a report. That put more than 17m passengers at risk, according to the report. In 2017, FAA inspectors began finding “potentially serious gaps” in Southwest’s process for verifying the condition of the planes, including major repairs that weren’t documented and maintenance records that didn’t meet FAA standards. Meeting US standards normally takes up to four weeks per plane, but people hired by Southwest approved 71 of the planes on the same day, the inspector general said. Southwest said 80 of the planes have been inspected and returned to flying, and the last eight are undergoing maintenance. The FAA gave the airline until this summer to bring the planes in compliance with federal rules because it accepted Southwest’s argument that the issues were low safety risks, the inspector general said. The watchdog office added that FAA has not given its inspectors enough guidance on reviewing risk assessments and evaluating an airline’s safety culture.<br/>