Southwest Airlines unsafe?

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Hostrauser
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Post by Hostrauser » Mon Mar 10, 2008 11:41 am

Ex Nihilo wrote:
Hostrauser wrote:
Ex Nihilo wrote:i thought the whole rudder thing had been solved years ago.
They devised a fix for it, but the fix doesn't help if the airline isn't performing the inspections to catch the potential problem in the first place.
Ex Nihilo wrote:...or maybe they just started training pilots to compensate
Not possible. That's why it's "uncommanded."
maybe i'm thinking of another problem.

cuz i remember now i watched a discovery channel thing about it. they trained the pilots to compensate in the event that the rudder control went all screwy.
Hm. Well, I mean, that's sounds feasible, since a plane has more control surfaces than a car. So it might be possible, but it's still not a problem I would want any flight crew to try and have to recover from. It would be like trying to steer a car with the steering whell locked all the way to one side. And an extreme rudder deflection could roll the plane in such a hurry the pilots would have very little time to analyze and react correctly.

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Post by Ex Nihilo » Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:38 pm

Hostrauser wrote:
Ex Nihilo wrote:
Hostrauser wrote: They devised a fix for it, but the fix doesn't help if the airline isn't performing the inspections to catch the potential problem in the first place.
Not possible. That's why it's "uncommanded."
maybe i'm thinking of another problem.

cuz i remember now i watched a discovery channel thing about it. they trained the pilots to compensate in the event that the rudder control went all screwy.
Hm. Well, I mean, that's sounds feasible, since a plane has more control surfaces than a car. So it might be possible, but it's still not a problem I would want any flight crew to try and have to recover from. It would be like trying to steer a car with the steering whell locked all the way to one side. And an extreme rudder deflection could roll the plane in such a hurry the pilots would have very little time to analyze and react correctly.
that's exactly what it was. i saw it again.

there was something wrong to where the rudder would actually do the opposite of what the pilot was telling it to. so they had to be trained in emergency procedures.

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Post by Hostrauser » Wed Mar 12, 2008 1:16 pm

All sorts of not good:

Southwest grounds 44 planes
CNN.com wrote:The FAA has said Southwest operated 46 Boeing 737s on nearly 60,000 flights between June 2006 and March 2007 while failing to comply with an FAA directive requiring repeated inspections of fuselage areas to detect fatigue cracking.

The FAA also alleges that after Southwest discovered it had failed to comply, it continued to operate the same planes on an additional 1,451 flights in March 2007. The airline later found that six of the 46 planes had fatigue cracks, the FAA said.
One plane with fatigue cracks is very bad. SIX? That is the suck.

Southwest has a long PR-road ahead of it to recover from this scandal.

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Post by The Aceman » Tue Mar 25, 2008 5:10 pm

Well, I braved 4 separate Southwest planes this weekend. And I survived, phew. BTW, I don't think Southwest is the only airline trying to save money by cutting back on safety. It's pretty much all of them.
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