OKC Impacts of Southwest 737-300 Fleet Gounding

[venture]

So far looks like little to any impacts on the OKC market. Some flights today are running about 2 hours behind, but nothing major. Probably thanks to it being a weekend. Depending on how fast they get the fleet back in the air, early week travel will probably see some impacts. For those unaware, Southwest flight 812 from Sacramento to Phoenix suffered a failure of the fuselage skin in flight. Roughly a 3 to 4 foot section tore away exposing the interior cabin to the outside. The aircraft rapidly lost pressurization and depleted the cabin of oxygen.

Captain took the plane down in a very rapid and steep descent from 36,000 ft to 10,900 feet in 3 minutes (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/S.../KNYL/tracklog). Pretty much a controlled nose dive that would have gave everyone a very wild ride. Looks like the peak altitude change rate was around 10,740 feet per minute down...when the typical is close to 2000 to 3000 fpm.

More info: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/04/02...ex.html?hpt=C1

Aircraft involved:


Photos of the hole:

[Kerry]

I'll bet that scared the crap out of everyone. On the plus side, it does put an end to the debate that a bullet shot from an armed pilot won't suck everyone out through a tiny hole if it misses its target.

[venture]

I'll bet that scared the crap out of everyone. On the plus side, it does put an end to the debate that a bullet shot from an armed pilot won't suck everyone out through a tiny hole if it misses its target.

It all depends on how rapid the decompression is. This could have been much worse. However, the design changes structurally from the 737-200 series to the -300/400/500 series probably helped to prevent another Aloha incident.

[bombermwc]

That's exactlly what I was thinking venture. But that flight is also a testament to Boeing that the plan didn't break apart totally. I guess one major difference here is, at the time of Aloha, metal fatigue wasn't believed to be an issue. I guess no one back then ever bent a paperclip back and fourth until it broke.

One thing you can see in this recent incident is that the metal tore out. It's hard to tell from the picture above, whether the metal tore up at the front or rear of the tear. That will tell the investigators a LOT about the cause. If it tore up at the front, that's weird as hell. If it flared up at the rear of the tear, ok so some rivots bloew and it caught the wind and ripped back. I bet that leads to bad inspections.

[SkyWestOKC]

Unfortunately, these are the things that have to happen in order to make aviation safer. It's safe to say, this won't happen again after these inspections. Aviation is an industry that learns from it's mistakes -- safety wise, anyway.

We'll see if it's serious enough to where the FAA issues an Airworthiness Directive. I'm sure Boeing will issue a Service Bulletin, but those are never mandatory. Only AD's.

[venture]

Looks like Southwest found 3 more 737s with extensive cracking developing. That is out of only 19 aircraft evaluated so far. Have a feeling we'll probably see an AD come out of this soon with such a high percentage having the cracks.