After 89,090 flight cycles, an Aloha Airlines plane lets go of its top in the 1980s.
Photo: Hawai'i State Archives, Aloha Airlines Disaster

by Barbara S. Peterson

A couple of days ago, a Southwest plane suddenly lost cabin pressure when a hole the size of a basketball ripped open in the ceiling of the fuselage. What followed was a textbook case of quick response:  the pilot descended to below 10,000 feet to stabilize the pressure (passengers had already donned oxygen masks) and swiftly landed the Baltimore-bound jet at the nearest  airport in Charleston, W. Virginia;  all 131 people board got off without injury.

So why is no one calling this one a miracle?

First, no birds were involved. I'm serious: the Hudson River splashdown of US Airways flight 1549, which made a hero of Captain "Sully" Sullenberger, was occasioned by a freak occurrence.  It's hard to fault the airline, the pilots, air traffic control or any other of the usual suspects for a flock of gargantuan geese taking out two engines at once.  This recent one was different and more problematic.

The Southwest plane was an older model 737, having logged some 42,000 cycles (takeoffs and landings). The airline said the craft was checked frequently for cracks, as required.  But it was all too recently that Southwest was dinged for $10.2 million by the FAA  for failing to check some 40-odd planes in its all-737 fleet for wear and tear.  The airline fought that initial penalty and the two sides settled for $7.5 mil.  Southwest insiders have told me they feel they've been unfairly treated because the FAA was trying to overcome cynicism about its coziness with the industry. But the incident raised memories of a truly horrific incident in the late 1980s when part of the ceiling peeled off an Aloha Airlines plane, and a flight attendant was sucked through the hole to her death.

As they age, planes are subject to stress cracks, which are hard to spot when they first appear--that's why airlines are supposed to subject older models to increasingly rigorous scrutiny.

But with more than 5,000 planes in the US commercial airline fleet the feds can't be there for each inspection, so airline maintenance is largely self-regulated.