Air Violations, Essay Example

In 2009, Southwest Airlines was fined for flying 46 airplanes on 59,791 flights because they failed to perform mandatory inspections for important safety requirements such as fuselage cracks (NBC News, 2009). In particular, the planes were Boeing 737s and carried an estimated 145,000 passengers. These fines were issued by the Federal Aviation Administration after a repeated lax attitude towards legally required safety regulations. This investigation came after many whistleblowers reported Southwest Airlines’ failure to comply with these regulations. Although Southwest Airlines is able to significantly reduce their airfare prices compared to their competition, it is important to note that many of the airlines’ own customers and employees grew considered over the conditions of the planes that the company would regularly dispatch. In addition to the fine, the FAA is requiring that Southwest Airlines needs to increase safety by altering the number of on-site technical representatives available to perform major maintenance procedures and by allowing the FAA inspectors to have an increase amount of access to information used for “tracking maintenance and engineering activities” (NBC News, 2009).

Airlines typically cut safety corners in light of protecting their employees in order to earn more profit. It costs a lot of money to ensure that proper safety procedures are met and by forgoing these procedures, their net profit will increase. In addition, ensuring proper safety procedures takes a lot of time; maintenance and check processes often slow down the ability of airlines to ship goods and people. In the case of Southwest Airlines, they likely decided to not do a lot of the required safety checks in order to provide better service to their customers, in a sense. In exchange for the safety procedures, flights would not be delayed and more customers would be able to reach their destinations in a timely manner.

References

NBC News. (2009). FAA fines Southwest for safety violations. Retrieved from http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29469571/#.UnG8-Pk_vT8