Southwest Airlines - announcement coming..

[Bullwinkle]

Tickets on sale next week?

https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news...tines.html

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Last week’s proving flight was a success.
Now Southwest has moved on to daily validation flights.
Might be another week before tickets go on sale.
https://news.yahoo.com/southwest-airline...38942.html

[Obie]

There is this little issue that might hold it up.

"Inspector General to Audit FAA Oversight of Southwest Airlines"

https://flightsafety.org/inspector-gener...-airlines/

Industry observers think the FAA might hold off until the results of this investigation come out.

They also have a dispute going on with their unionized mechanics over scope clauses in their contract.

[leilanidude]

https://finance.yahoo.com/m/7890462c-e11...lares.html

"...Southwest Airlines on Friday morning issued a blunt memo to hundreds of the carrier’s mechanics.

The memo, which came Lonnie Warren, Southwest's senior director of tech ops production, declared what the low-fare carrier called a “state of operational emergency.”

[Obie]

"Some 2,400 mechanics work full time for Southwest."

"Delta TechOps is a division of Delta Air Lines. Over 9,600 Technical Operations employees system-wide provide full-service aviation maintenance."

Maybe they should sign a contract with them after negotiating for 6 years.Maybe they need to hire more mechanics.

[Old Croc]

Marvelous. Angry mechanics servicing aircraft that fly over a large body of water for hours. Anyone remember The High and the Mighty?

[Bullwinkle]

Another successful round trip....angry mechanics or not ....the bottom line is the newer equipment requires so much less intervention by humans than previous generation technology.

remember the old days when we had to "warm up" tv's and stereos? replace tubes every couple of hundred hours to keep a tv working?

aircraft have followed the same reliability curve, require much less intervention between scheduled maintenance periods and those maintenance periods are further and further apart.

how many of us still change our motor oil at 3k miles, plugs caps and rotor at 12k miles?

some of the SW aircraft were pulled from service for defective tray tables....union slow downs are a counter productive tactic have no place in modern aviation...if Boeing and or CFM certify and approve offshore maintenance who are we to second guess? ...my 2 cents on the topic

[Obie]

Yeah the reliability has improved greatly.
However, there are still a lot of systems on airplanes that require old fashioned maintenance.

On topic,SWA landed in Hilo yesterday.The flight was scheduled to fly from OAK to HNL but diverted into Hilo.Don't know if it was an exercise or a real problem.Plane was on the ground for 3 hours and then flew to HNL.

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA8.../KOAK/PHNL

It descended pretty rapidly to 10,000 feet so it may have been a pressurization problem or it may have been a test by the FAA.

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA8...O/tracklog

[terracore]

Virgin landed at least one plane during certification at Hilo too. I don't think it was a problem, maybe just saving fuel/time.

[Bullwinkle]

certification requires a inflight apu start

apu units in the 737 max (per the "book" ) may only be started below 10000 feet

more than likely a electrical system / load transfer exercise imho