CHICAGO —

Travel nightmares haunted would-be passengers Thursday as safety checks grounded thousands of U.S. flights for the third straight day in the wake of a scandal over skipped aircraft inspections.

American Airlines canceled 900 flights Thursday, bringing its total to more than 2,400 flights since Tuesday, as it tests the wiring on its fleet of 300 MD-80 airplanes.

Tens of thousands of customers were stranded and the airline said it will take several more days before operations are returned to normal.

Safety inspections have also grounded hundreds of United, Southwest and Delta flights in recent weeks. Alaska Airlines and Midwest Airlines canceled two dozen flights Thursday after grounding MD-80 planes for inspection.

The inspection crackdown comes as Congress investigates what whistle-blowers have called the “cozy relationship” between safety regulators and the airlines.

Last week, Federal Aviation Administration whistle-blowers denounced conduct by higher-ranking officials that permitted Southwest Airlines to skip aircraft inspections, allowing some to fly with cracks in their fuselages.

The FAA conducted an audit of all domestic airlines’ maintenance paperwork after Southwest was fined $10.2 million for flying dozens of planes without undergoing fuselage inspections.

US aviation safety chief Robert Sturgell said last week that a two-week audit of all domestic airlines, prompted by incidents at Southwest, shows 99% compliance with safety directives.

The safety problems are the latest to rattle the airline industry which is already suffering from high fuel prices and growing customer dissatisfaction over delays, cancellations and lost luggage.

Some 29% of U.S. flights last year were delayed or canceled, affecting about 163 million passengers, according to a report released Wednesday.

More than 88,234 flights were stuck on the tarmac for one hour to five hours or longer, affecting nearly 5.9 million passengers.

The delays this week brought some travelers to tears as long lines of stranded passengers snaked through terminals.

“The ticket agent had the nerve to tell me ‘crying wasn’t going to solve anything,’” complained American Airlines customer Kathryn Riley, who was stranded with her eight-month-old daughter in Dallas, Texas after their connecting flight was canceled.

American Airlines apologized profusely for the inconvenience.

“We are doing everything we possibly can to reaccommodate our customers,” American Airlines president Gerard Arpey said in a press briefing. “It’s my fault and I take full responsibility.”

This was the second time in a matter of weeks the airline had to ground its MD-80 airplanes in order to comply with new rules on protecting wires in the wheel wells from chafing.

Arpey said the airline’s mechanics had already protected the wires but the adjustments were not “precisely in compliance with the FAA’s interpretation of their own airworthiness directives.”

Some analysts say the safety concerns are overblown. “I have never in my life seen regulation more out of control than it is right now,” said Darryl Jenkins, a longtime industry analyst and consultant. “The price to the industry and to the traveling public is going to be enormous.”

The added scrutiny could increase maintenance costs and even affect travel demand, warned Morgan Stanley analyst William Green.

“When customer concerns about airline safety coincide with economic weakness, the impact on airline financials can be serious,” Greene wrote in a report Wednesday.

Two discount airlines, ATA Airlines and Hawaii-based Aloha Airlines, have halted operations after declaring bankruptcy in recent weeks.

Delta Air Lines offered buyouts to 30,000 employees, more than half its workforce, last month in a major overhaul of operations as it struggles with record-high fuel prices.

“The timing of these problems is unfortunate, as air travel demand is likely to be softer than last year, due to the very weak economy, and very high fuel prices are adding billions of dollars to airlines’ expenses,” Standard & Poor’s analyst Philip Baggaley wrote in a report Thursday.

“A longer-term issue, which will affect all of the U.S. airlines, is that these persistent operational problems at multiple carriers may make them more wary of raising fares further to offset very high fuel prices.”

Wire reports

2 Comments

• 

  jambon at 10:07 PM JST - 11th April

  Last month, the FAA fined Southwest $10.2 million for flying planes that missed inspections, and it understandably got the attention of politicians and other carriers. But it's worth keeping in mind that the airline industry is largely self-regulating, a system that works because airlines have every incentive to be safe. The economic costs of an accident have been known to put airlines out of business. It's no wonder that maintenance-related commercial plane crashes in the U.S. are almost unheard of. [...] "The impression in the press is that the airlines aren't meeting high FAA standards," says Clifford Winston, who follows the industry at the Brookings Institution. "But that's ridiculous. It's the airlines who teach the FAA about these aircraft and what has to be done to maintain them."

  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120778513946003305.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

  If the pilots are sweating it, what's up?

• 

  jambon at 10:46 PM JST - 11th April

  Correction.

  If the pilots are not sweating it, what's up?

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