Last week, an Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to LA had to make an emergency landing shortly after take-off when a hole ripped open in the fuselage where a baggage handler had accidentally driven the cart into the plane. After the flight, one of the passengers blogged about his experience and posted photos he had taken aboard the flight. Here's where the odd thing happened...some people started leaving nasty comments on his blog ripping his bravery, knowledge and ethics. Well, the guy who writes the blog checked the IP addresses of the people leaving the messages and learned that they were actually coming from Alaska Airlines' IP addresses. So, now, Alaska Airlines has both a safety problem to deal with, as well as a public relations problem. It never looks good when you have an employee calling a guy a coward becasue he was scared during an emergency landing. Obviously, the person leaving the messages weren't from AA's PR department and they certainly don't represent the official positions of AA. However, it's the equivalent of a uniformed employee making a comment to a customer and another example of companies learning that technology can bite them in the a$$. It'll be interesting to follow to see how Alaska Airlines handles this. You can follow the original post and the subsequent posts on his blog: http://www.jeremyhermanns.org/
Wasn't Alaska Airlines' shoddy maintenence found to be a least partly to blame in a major crash within the last five years? I think this is it: http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2002/AAR0201.htm Killed almost 90 people.
Interesting that the bump by the baggage cart was sufficient to cause decompression at altitude, but apparently not loud enough for the pilot(s) to ask for someone to look at it before takeoff.
There was a documentary done on the crash and it was found that a decision my mechanics to take the plane out of service was reversed by the management. Part of the pilots job is to do a walkaround of the plane to notice any problems.
Link? I've averaged over 40 commericial aviation legs per year for the last four or five years, and I've never seen a commercial jet pilot leave the plane after the baggage doors are closed in order to walk around the plane. In fact, the cabin door is usually closed before the baggage handlers are done.
How? You said it's a pilot's job to walk around the plane. I've pointed out that it isn't. Exactly what did I misread?
I have never seen a commercial pilot walk around a plane. If that's a requirement, then it is one that is never - in my experience - followed. And given the number of times I've been on a plane in which baggage was still being loaded after the cabin door was shut, I don't see how the pilots could be responsible for being aware that the baggage handlers ran into the plane, much less inspecting the damage. I'm just sayin'
Walkarounds are usually performed by the first crew of the day for a given airplane, or when that same plane has a change of crew. In most cases, the inspection is done prior to baggage loading. From that point on, it becomes the responsibility of the ground crew to note any incidents or irregularities before the plane leaves the gate. That being said, I can't imagine that at least one of the flight crew didn't notice that a baggage cart rammed into the plane hard enough to cause decompression at altitude.
It's a shame that there's no government agency that could, at a federal level, administer aviation. If such a federal aviation adminstration actually existed, I bet they'd have a web site where one could look up things like preflight checklists.