As federal aviation safety officials investigated Tuesday why a Baltimore-bound jet was forced into an emergency landing by a football-size hole in its passenger cabin, Southwest Airlines said it found no other problems in a mass inspection of its planes.
The Boeing 737-300 took off in Nashville, Tenn., and landed safely in West Virginia about 5 p.m. Monday after the 1-foot-by-1-foot hole opened up in the rear of the aircraft. The National Transportation Safety Board sent two investigators to the scene and could issue a preliminary report about the incident as soon as next week, said spokesman Keith Holloway. But it might be a year before the board issues any conclusions about what caused the fuselage hole.
The landing comes four months after the Federal Aviation Administration levied a $7.5 million civil penalty against Southwest for failing to perform inspections for fuselage fatigue cracks.
The Boeing 737-300, which seats 137, makes up about a third of the carrier's fleet. Southwest spokeswoman Whitney Eichinger said the airline inspected all 200 Monday night and Tuesday morning out of "caution" to make sure there weren't any problems with the other planes. The company described them as "walk-around" visual inspections.
"We did not find anything from that," Eichinger said. "There were no other issues with any of the 300s."
Columbia resident Adam Baddock, returning to Maryland on that plane, was listening to music on his iPhone when he felt "this great burst of wind." It wasn't until they arrived at the airport in Charleston that Baddock discovered "a hole had popped open dead-center in the roof, right in front of the tail."
"Really, until we landed, none of us up front knew the extent," he said. "Ignorance is bliss would apply here. I was fully under the impression, 'Oh, we're going to be fine.' "
Les Dorr, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said his agency is also examining the aircraft to "see if we can determine if there are any broader safety actions that we might have to order."
Mary F. Schiavo, who was inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation from 1990 to 1996, thinks it should be a "wake-up call" for Southwest, the dominant airline at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
