It has been done, at least once, though; so it is survivable. I kinda wonder if the people who try it do any sort of research and preparation. If someone absolutely had to, what steps could they take to give them the best shot at it?
Would such a discussion be off limits here? Should probably get a mod to weigh in before we share any ideas.
Wait, what? Southwest pilots don’t do walkarounds? Why not?
Years ago SWA asked the FAA for an exemption, saying it was a waste of time and slowed down their famously quick proverbial “10 minute” turnarounds. This was in the Kelleher era where the FAA behaved as if they’d been thoroughly bribed and SWA could do no wrong. It’s still in effect. IIRC / AIUI the first flight of the calendar day requires a pilot preflight and for the rest of that day they’re simply skipped.
They also got an exemption to the 250 knots below 10000’ speed limit for their original hub (that they resolutely refused to call a hub) at Houston Hobby = HOU. It was supposedly an experiment, but no data was ever gathered. It was simply a way to shorten flight times out of HOU by a couple of minutes.
The original motivation for 250 below 10 is that 250 is the certification standard for windshield bird impacts. And 10K MSL is both a nice round number and an altitude at/above which birds are very, very rare. As you descend below 10K, bird density increases quickly.
IOW, SWA got an exemption to operate the airplane outside of its certificated safety envelope at an airport and region on migratory bird flyways in the name of saving time. To be fair, every airline that flew in and out of HOU could use the speed limit exemption. But few did. As well, that speed limit is not internationally universal. But it’s close.
The “experiment” eventually ended some time in the early 2000s after a good 30 years in operation. Still, no data was gathered or submitted to anyone Federal. Oddly enough, not long after Kelleher stepped down from the head honcho role.
The dude had juice in Washington, that’s for sure.
Wow, I had no idea. I guess that, as a regular SWA customer who has never been involved in a crash (or other, less-serious incident, AFAIK), I’ve benefited from however much time was saved not doing the walkarounds. But how much time does it actually save?
Have there ever been any incidents on SWA that could plausibly been traced to a skipped inspection? I assume not, or it would have been big news.
What’s the general opinion in the aviation world about this practice? No biggie, or a disaster waiting to happen?
(Since I probably won’t be flying SWA as much after they end open boarding, I’m not as concerned about this as I might otherwise have been.)
Somewhere in between, but on the end closer to “no biggie”.
The certification approval and airworthiness certificate for the aircraft rely on the plane being operated and maintained within its approved limitations, and part of that is the published Flight Manual and Flight Crew Operating Manual. Those manuals were built on the assumption that various tasks and inspections are done at given intervals, but there certainly are cases where those intervals are practical in nature and weren’t necessarily optimized for all operators.
Now, the pilots are not maintenance staff. They perform visual inspections, check certain gauge readings (I presume?) and otherwise just look for damage or weirdness. The pre-flight vs first-of-the-day is, conceptually, where you’d find damage or weirdness from the previous flight; undetected bird strike, leaking fluids, etc. Leaking fluids is bad but those systems don’t rely solely on the pilot observation; they have sensors and cockpit indications, and are generally detectable quickly when the pilot gets inside. Bird strike, on the other hand, might not trigger any sort of cockpit alert, but may be a weaker area of the aircraft that could have more damage under flight loads, which could be a problem with more severe consequences.
At this point, probabilities come into play. The odds that an event happened, was not noticed by previous crew or pax, was not noticed by ground servicing crew, was not noticed by new crew (who didn’t specifically look), is not triggering any sort of cockpit warning, and is such that a hazardous or catastrophic outcome is inevitable…well that’s pretty damn unlikely. And there’s a lot of math and definitions that go into what those acceptable probabilities are in an approval, so it isn’t gut feeling.
Presumably the petition for exemption had SW do some of that math for more critical possible things the pilot is no longer looking at. If they didn’t, the FAA failed horribly in their responsibilities by granting the exemption. The exemption should not, ever, reduce safety.
That said, I think the “proper” way would be to petition the OEM to review their maintenance data and alleviate/reduce the inspection task in the AFM/FCOM and get a proper approval for that.
I suspect most of the time the entry occurs after the plane departs the ramp so it wouldn’t be caught. What I think is a big deal is a walk around before every flight. Crap happens with even the smallest plane and you don’t see it if you don’t look. The more complex the plane, the more parts that can fail.
Frankly I don’t know why mechanics don’t do the walk around. They know more about the inner workings than the flight crew.
Because they cost money. All those folks were got rid of in the late 1990s. Mechanics perform overnight inspections and respond to real time repair requests. Nobody has A&Ps inspecting through flights mid-day.
Remember in driver’s Ed when you were told to check all your lights, including brake lights, before driving anywhere to make sure none were burnt out?
Do you do that?
I’ve had brake lights fail, and other people have told me (fortunately never pulled over for it). There’s a reason you have three of them (in modern cars).
If your rear bumper got hit while you were parked and you didn’t notice til the next day, it’s unlikely your car would fail because of it (though your safety margin is reduced) and it it started making funny noises you would notice and you’d go check.
On some level, this is what we’re talking about.
If it’s critical to the ability of the flight crew to conduct safe flight and landing then it’s reinforced, redundant, monitored, annunciated and checked during routine maintenance tasks at preventative intervals by trained mechanics. If it’s only going to cause minor inconvenience and not affect safe flight, then the checks can be much less frequent. Some of the scheduled checks are a little arbitrary in the sense that “it should be checked routinely, let’s make it daily to be conservative” when the probability of failure and safety analysis would be absolutely fine with a weekly check. It is, in some cases, up to an engineer who just needs “a check that’s good” documented. Sometimes you just pair it up with another one around the same frequency and don’t really consider the nuisance that might be in practice.
I’m not entirely sure what’s on the walk around for 737s but I do know they are big and people are small and the pilot probably won’t see dents or cracks on most parts of it anyways.
Let’s just say “I can see how a case can be made for the exemption” but I don’t know whether I agree with it without knowing details.
True.
But sliding off a runway because a leaking brake line fails or a gear won’t extend costs a lot of money. When I was between jobs working on a ramp crew (for chartered freighters) they all had a maintenance person meet the plane. Maybe the bigger planes get more love.
That depends on how they would be doing their walk-arounds if they did them. Where I work the walk-around doesn’t cost any time at all as it is done while the other pilot is programming the FMS and setting up the cockpit. Even if it did cost a bit of pilot time, we are almost never the last ones ready out of the whole aircraft turn-around operation. 99.9% of the time we are waiting on cargo loading and passengers. If we didn’t do a walk-around it would just be more time twiddling our thumbs waiting for other people to be ready.
I could see it costing time if the company insisted on the walk-around being done after everything is closed up, cargo doors, fuelling finished, etc, but we don’t do it like that. The final check that everything is closed and secure is done by our ground staff.
What’s the general opinion in the aviation world about this practice? No biggie, or a disaster waiting to happen?
I’m ok with no pilot walk-around as long as someone with suitable training has done one. I’ve found feathers in engines, hydraulic leaks, and missing screws on a walk-around. None of those would have been disastrous if they’d been missed but they do demonstrate the need for someone to have a look.
Update on Yahoo. Ewwwww.
An anonymous law enforcement source told CNN that the bodies were badly decomposed when they were found, which, if true, likely indicates that the stowaways were onboard the aircraft for multiple flights.
Concur with all this. Nowadays. There’s enough admin crap to getting the plane going that one pilot can be busy computer-ing while the other is preflighting. I used to figure that from the moment the two pilots touched the airplane until we could move it was 30 minutes if we hustled along smartly. More like 35 if we hadn’t prepped our iPads first so showed up completely cold about this leg. We tried to be there 1 hour prior and if everything went perfectly and we worked deliberately and got our pre-departure coffee and piss break we’d be twiddling the last 15 minutes waiting for the cabin & ground crew to be ready.
Contrast that with this:
Back in the days before computers on airplanes, the entire pilot prep process for an airplane you brought in was “Put away the approach plate you used to land, pull out the SID chart you’ll use to depart, set the initial VOR freq, course, and heading from the chart, listen to the ATIS, set the altimeter, call for ATC clearance, set the initial altitude and transponder code, flip a few overhead switches, read the 8-item through-flight checklist and push off the gate.” Meantime you were fueled through, 8 people got off, and 12 more got on, nobody checked baggage so the cargo holds weren’t even opened, and there was no catering or cleaning. Briefings? YGBSM. We don’ need no steenkin’ briefings! We just did the whole prep process together and I can look at your settings and you can look at mine. If they’re the same, we’re in sync. Let’s go.
That is how you do a genuine 10 minute turnaround. Doing a pilot walkaround would add 10 minutes to that very streamlined process. IOW it’d double the time required. Hence their motivation in 1975 to get that waived.
Nowadays? Not so much.
And that makes more sense to me. That plane’s last flight before the bodies were found originated in New York. While I guess it’s not impossible, I can’t imagine someone so desperate to leave New York that they would stow away in a plane’s wheel well. It’s more plausible that they boarded in somplace like Port-au-Prince (I checked; JetBlue does fly there), and weren’t discovered until after the plane made several more flights.
But ’ badly decomposed’ doesn’t happen in one day. Obviously, they were tucked in enough that they didn’t fall out & I don’t know the specifics of the walk around procedures; does someone just look at the wheels/tires or do they stick their head up in there & inspect the whole cavity?
It smelled so bad they didn’t want to get close!
I’m wondering if “badly decomposed” may turn out to be “badly maimed”. Meaning, the unfortunate stowaways’ bodies were terribly abused mechanically.
I doubt very much that they could have been there long enough to truly decompose. Between crew and maintenance inspections, it’s unlikely nobody looked in the wheel wells for more than a day or so. When I was an airline pilot we inspected every morning before first flight and a mechanic went over them in the evening. Maybe at an understaffed outstation they went a night without a mechanic inspection. So I’m very skeptical they were there much longer than a day or two, tops.
Did you read that somewhere or making it up? Smelling bad is an indication of length of time decomposing.
A body in the morgue is ‘put on ice’ in a personal-sized fridge drawer. These bodies would be even colder in flight. The Dope might just know the answer to this question - do bodies that are repeatedly frozen & thawed decompose faster than just one sitting in ambient air?
You can’t see in the wheel well on a normal walk-around because the main gear doors are closed. You’d need a ladder or something. https://youtu.be/XKbTckW5oWQ?si=FQLIFnPEXr8UJsvL&t=67
It was a joke.
Had a business jet customer once tell me they had issues with a strange odour on the plane. It was noticed during the first flight, but due to the planned route it was a couple of flights before it could really be investigated (plane didn’t fly every day, but flew multiple legs when it did fly, I think). Uneventful flights in general otherwise.
Inspection back at base revealed a decomposing racoon in the main landing gear bay. It was apparently a rather disgusting process to clean it out, and required disconnecting some stuff for proper cleaning, so quite a lot of time spent putting the plane back into service.