More Problems For Alaska Airlines
Under pressure from the Federal Aviation Administration, Alaska Airlines has agreed to review recent heavy maintenance checks and corresponding records for nearly all of its planes over the next two weeks, CBS News Correspondent Bob Orr reports for CBSNews.com.
This comes after FAA inspectors found that two Alaska jets, one B-737 and one MD-80, had been returned to passenger service without all of the maintenance paperwork being completed.
From the records, FAA inspectors were unable to determine if the repair work was done properly. But, the FAA says, even paperwork discrepancies are a serious concern.
Alaska will review six planes a day for the next two weeks. The re-inspection involves 81 jets of Alaska's fleet of 89. Eight planes are so new they've not yet been through a heavy maintenance check.
All of this, of course, follows the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 off the California coast on January 31, in which 88 people died, and a series of problems that have plagued the airline since then.
Within the first week after the deadly crash, another Alaska Airlines MD-80 jet had to return to Reno's airport shortly after takeoff because the pilot reported motors controlling the plane's horizontal stabilizer were operating improperly.
Flight attendants donned life jackets and explained crash procedures before the craft made a rough landing.
The horizontal stabilizer was widely thought to be a possible cause of the Flight 261 crash.
Weeks later, passengers aboard another Alaskan Airlines flight had to tackle a man who muttered incoherently as he roamed the aisles of their commercial jet and then attacked a pilot in the cockpit.
In mid-March, the airline said it had put a top manager on leave while it investigates claims by 64 Seattle mechanics that they were "pressured, threatened and intimidated"to cut corners on repairs.
Alaska Airlines Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John F. Kelly said at the time that he "was shocked to learn that 64 employees had written to tell me that they felt pressured, threatened and intimidated."
"They also raised serious allegations regarding maintenance practices here at Alaska Airlines," Kelly said.
Days later, The Seattle Times reported that federal authorities had opened a criminal probe into the Flight 261 crash, although no wrongdoing had yet established.
The newspaper said the Federal Bureau of Investigation and investigators from the Department of Transportation have been questioning Alaska Airlines employees as part of an inquiry into airline maintenance practices.
The FBI neither confirmed nor denied that report.
That criminal investigation grew out of a 15-month-old inquiry into ractices at Alaska's maintenance facility at Oakland, Calif., the Times said. In that inquiry, a grand jury in San Francisco is investigating whether supervisors signed for repairs that weren't done or that they weren't authorized to approve.
Wreckage recovery in the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the Flight 261 crash was completed on March 15.
Laboratory work on the plane’s metallurgy was expected to continue several more weeks. Attention was sure to focus on the horizontal stabilizer assembly, which works to control a plane’s up-and-down movement.
Indeed, in a March 15 press release, NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said that, "the thread on the accident gimbal nut is missing, and remnant strips of the thread were wrapped around the jackscrew."
The gimbal nut helps slide the horizontal stabilizer up and down the jackscrew. If the gimbal nut's threads were stripped bare, it is possible the stabilizer might have slipped down the jackscrew rapidly, forcing Flight 261 into an uncontrollable dive.
But he added that, "No determination has been made as to whether this damage occurred before or after the aircraft's impact with the ocean's surface."