From the Wall Street Journal:
"Federal aviation regulators are seeking a penalty of at least $3 million from Southwest Airlines Co. for failing to properly inspect nearly four dozen older planes for potentially hazardous structural cracks, according to people familiar with the details. The penalty is expected to be the largest imposed against any passenger carrier in about two decades.
The Department of Transportation and a congressional committee are examining why the Federal Aviation Administration didn't ground the planes temporarily last March after learning of the missed inspections. The case focuses on the carrier's failure to perform certain inspections on its older-version Boeing 737-300s as required.
Calling it an inadvertent internal-maintenance misstep, the airline initially believed as many as 100 planes out of a fleet of more than 190 of those models were affected, according to one person familiar with details. The inspections are part of an FAA 2004 aging-aircraft safety directive.
Southwest completed all the inspections roughly 10 days after it voluntary alerted the agency about the problem, which didn't cause any accidents or incidents. Six of the 46 affected aircraft turned out to have cracks -- some as long as four inches -- in the fuselage, according to one person familiar with details. The mandatory inspections, part of federal and industry efforts to ensure the structural integrity of older passenger jets, are designed to detect and repair such cracks when they are much smaller and pose less of a safety risk."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1204..._us_whats_news
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