Southwest Airlines inspected all 181 of its Boeing 737-300 jets overnight after a small section of the fuselage on one jet peeled up Monday, prompting a rapid decompression and an emergency landing in West Virginia.
Passengers aboard Flight 2294 from Nashville to Baltimore could see through the approximately 1-foot-by-1-foot hole in the top of the jet near where the vertical fin rises from the jet's tail. The flight was carrying 126 passengers and five crew.
Passenger Brian Cunningham told NBC's Today show Tuesday that he had dozed off in his seat in mid-cabin when he was awakened by "the loudest roar I'd ever heard."
He said the hole was above his seat. People stayed calm and put on the oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling.
"After we landed in Charleston, the pilot came out and looked up through the hole, and everybody applauded, shook his hand, a couple of people gave him hugs," Cunningham said.
Teams from the National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing were arriving in Charleston to examine the jet.
The damage was similar to several incidents in previous decades, including cases that caused fatalities.
The highest death count in aviation history occurred on Aug. 12, 1985, when a Japan Air Lines 747 suddenly decompressed, damaging the jet's hydraulic system and rendering it uncontrollable. The jet slammed into a mountain, killing 520 of the 524 people aboard. The accident was blamed on a faulty repair that had been done seven years earlier.
A flight attendant died on an Aloha Airlines 737 on April 28, 1988, when 18 feet of the jet's skin peeled back at 24,000 feet. The NTSB ruled that undetected fatigue had weakened the jet. The accident prompted broad new inspections of aging aircraft.
The Southwest 737 was delivered to the airline in 1994, said airline spokeswoman Beth Harbin. Inspections of the 180 other 737-300s in the airline's fleet overnight showed no evidence of anything unusual, Harbin said. About 20 flights experienced minor delays this morning as maintenance workers conducted the inspections.
The airline sent a backup jet to Charleston to pick up the passengers after the emergency landing. They arrived in Baltimore at about 9 p.m., about two hours late, Harbin said.
Last March, Southwest agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges that it operated planes that had missed required safety inspections for cracks in the fuselage. The inspections were prompted by the 1988 Aloha crash.
The airline had made nearly 60,000 flights without the required inspections. A senior FAA inspector allowed the airline to make some of the flights even after the missed inspections came to light.
Southwest performed all of the necessary inspections last year and insisted that safety had not been compromised.
Federal regulations require aircraft manufacturers to build a jet's fuselage strong enough so that if a hole opens up in flight it will not spread or damage the nearby structure.
Dallas-based Southwest carries more than 100 million U.S. passengers a year, more than any other airline.
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