Again, in fairness, SWA started flying in the jet age, when dramatic improvements in safety had been pioneered by airlines that had come before. Among them,
United.
It's not fair to compare safety records of a company that was around to make those changes happen. SWA is flying to Hawaii for the first time this year. Using modern planes with turbines and GPS. United started doing it in 1947 with piston engines and a sextant.
So many things that the industry takes for granted today, were, in fact, developed, or introduced by United. For example; flight attendants. In 1930.
http://time.com/3847732/first-stewardess-ellen-church/
Weather radar, airborne radio, crew resource management - all United contributions. There are more, and for that, I recommend that you read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Age-Flight-History-Americas-Pioneering/dp/0966706110
The last fatality caused by pilot error at United was in 1978. In Portland. The ALPA and UAL response to that; Cockpit Resource Management, or CRM, has changed the industry for the better. It's the standard for pilot interaction at every airline, including Southwest.
CRM was a critical enabler in two of the greatest feats of airmanship in modern history, United 232 and United 811, both in 1989. Al Haynes, flying a DC-10, faced a far more difficult problem than Chesley Sullenberger - the DC-10 had lost an engine in a turbine failure that caused a complete loss of all hydraulics. Al Haynes had no flight controls and no engine controls, because they were hydraulically boosted.
He had nothing.
Yet he managed to find a way to control the airplane through manipulation of the thrust on the remaining engines via an access in the floor of the cockpit. The airplane was unflyable, and yet, through brilliant leadership and CRM, he managed to get it to Sioux City, Iowa. No one should've survived. But many did. Sully could fly his airplane. He had flight controls. Al Haynes' accomplishment was far more impressive.
United 811 lost a cargo door on climbout, damaging the wing, the structure, and destroying both engines on that side. They flew the airplane back to Hawaii. It was a design flaw in the door, and the 747 wasn't designed to fly on just two engines, but this crew managed the multiple systems failures: pneumatic, hydraulic, flight control, and yes the loss of two engines to fly it back. They landed overweight, with partial flaps, and two engines out.
Because of great CRM.
So, while SWA and United are both in the top ten for safety world-wide, SWA has, until recently, operated in the benign, safe environment of the domestic US, with none of the challenges of long flights, poor ATC, international rules and navigation. It's simply not reasonable to compare safety records when one airline was operating as a pioneer, and one began its operations in the safe environment built by others.
The worrisome part of SWA right now is the trend. Scraping a wingtip is bad. But banging up airplanes consistently, with over-runs, taxi incursions, gear collapsing, all as the result of pilot error, is indicative of something troublesome underneath. It was only luck that many of those weren't fatal. One of them was fatal, not to a passenger, but to the kid in the minivan killed when they over-ran Midway.
The culture isn't focused on improvement, or even, really, on safety. It's relentlessly focused on one-time performance, (even though DAL was the best at on time last year, and UAL was second, by only 320 flights out of over 700,000...) and relentlessly on utilization (turn times and getting the jet back in the air) because those factors drive costs down and profits up.
Pilots at SWA joke about the "most dangerous spot on the airport is between me and my gate!" and wear their "cowboy" reputation as a badge of honor.
But it's a sign of trouble. It's a sign of a willingness to "bend the rules" to "get the job done". The revelation that SWA was not calculating weights accurately, or even correctly, for years, is indicative of a culture that is under pressure to perform, not a culture that rewards introspection, improvement, or safety. It worries me. It worries friends that I have at the airline. They know that they're watched for their performance. And they're worried, just a bit, that they will be taken to court if they try and resist the pressure, if they try and change the culture.
SWA is a good airline. But to compare it with a UAL, or DAL, is specious as the operating history is so different, the environments are so different.
But ask yourself this question: why is SWA management taking their mechanics to court? Is that a sign of a healthy culture? Is that a company that values its employees?
That values safety?
Would pilots that were focused on safety try to land in that severe wind THREE times? Those pilots were clearly focused on getting there....and that's my point. The pilots at SAW are under pressure to perform, not to keep it safe...
I would've tried landing there, too. I probably would've tried twice. But three times? That's a relentless focus on completion, not on a safe outcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811
