Southwest Airlines Co. is speeding up its review of the 35,500 fan blades in its airliner engines after one of them broke earlier this month, leading to a midair failure that killed a passenger.
Jennifer Riordan, a Wells Fargo executive from Albuquerque, died when shrapnel from the failed engine pierced the cabin of a Boeing 737 airliner traveling from New York to Dallas. The National Transportation Safety Board is currently conducting an investigation into the accident, which forced the pilot to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia.
Since the beginning of the year, 17,000 blades have been hand-inspected and no defects were found, according to Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven. Southwest originally aimed to complete the inspections, which began after an engine failure in 2016, by the end of this year, which the company said would have met the recommended service timeline.
But Van de Ven said the airline will speed up the reviews of the remaining 18,000, with the goal of finishing them within the next 30 days. Defects weren’t found in any of the 8,500 fan blades reviewed since the accident, he added.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck activity to work through the inspections, the investigation and to do a deep dive to understand what happened and why,” Van de Ven said on the company’s quarterly earnings call.
The airline predicted that bookings would decrease in the coming weeks a result of the incident.
In the days following the fatal accident, revenue per available seat mile, an industry gauge of operating performance, fell as much as 1 percent, Southwest President Tom Nealon said. Despite that, CEO Gary Kelly struck an optimistic tone for the remainder of the year.
Excluding the softer bookings, the “trends look pretty normal to me,” he said. “Our revenue plan this year has always been a second-half story.”
Kelly said the recently passed tax law will help boost demand for air travel and called the outlook for the rest of the year “positive.”
