Southwest penalty prompts wider worries

Southwest Airlines Co. may be in the spotlight over its aircraft-maintenance practices, but the attention has raised potentially more troubling questions for the whole airline industry:

Have the airlines gotten too cozy with the Federal Aviation Administration watchdogs who monitor industry safety? If they have, does that mean you should imagine a worst-case scenario each time you board a flight?

Airline officials and industry experts say no to both questions. They point to a steadily improving airline-safety record that shows that a system that relies heavily on voluntary compliance with maintenance regulations is working. And having FAA inspectors and airline-maintenance officials who know and trust one another does not necessarily mean a coziness that leads to lax oversight, they say.

"We had a safety record in the 1990s that, at today's air-traffic level, would produce a fatal accident every month," said Basil Barimo, vice president of safety and operations for the Air Transport Association, a trade group.

"In 2007, we had zero fatal accidents. In many ways, having a close relationship between the airlines and FAA is absolutely critical."

Yet to others, including influential members of Congress and a union representing FAA inspectors, the system is fragile and depends too much on airlines' following every step of the aircraft-maintenance process to the letter of the law. The union says the FAA's senior administrators seem to be more concerned with keeping airlines solvent rather than safe, an accusation the FAA rejects.

An FAA inspector's job today mostly involves checking computerized records kept by carriers to make sure that required maintenance work was done, rather than actually inspecting planes, said Linda Goodrich, vice president of the Professional Aviation System Specialists union.

The union estimated there are about 2,800 FAA inspectors today, about 30 percent fewer than a decade ago.

"Is it safe?" Goodrich said. "We, and they, don't even know. . . . We won't know until there's a smoking hull."

Questions about the system have arisen from a week of intense scrutiny of Southwest's maintenance practices, first revealed when the FAA announced a record $10.2 million fine to penalize the airline for allowing dozens of planes to continue flying despite missing scheduled maintenance work.