Place: McDonald's
Lunch: 2 Filet-O-Fish, fries, Dr. Pepper
It's fast food fish season (aka "lent" for you religious freaks). 2 Filet-O-Fish are $3.33. Culver's Northwoods Walleye is back. And over the weekend, I finally tried Freddy's fish sandwich, which consists of two pieces of fish with cheese on a regular hamburger bun garnished with "Freddy sauce" (the same stuff they put on their fake In-N-Out "California Style" burger). Holy crap...it was awesome.
The poor kids over at Southwest sure didn't have a good weekend, did they. One of their older Boeing 737-300 Classics developed a five-foot tear in its fuselage mid-flight. The cabin depressurized. Oxygen masks deployed. The pilots made a quick dive to an altitude where they didn't need pressurization and ultimately safely landed the aircraft to much applause from the freaked out passengers.
I imagine it must have felt like a roller coaster ride where you actually think "Jeepers. I just might die right now."
Probably less matter-of-factly than that. Unless it was a flight full of Monks.
(By the way, if you didn't know, the official Boeing pronunciation of all Boeing models is to sound the second number as a single digit..."737" is "seven-THREE-seven", not "seven-THIRTY-seven", for example. Nobody but Boeing employees and me seem to know this.)
I'm probably dwelling on it just a little bit more than you are because I just flew on an even older Southwest 737-300 a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I flew on two of them. Ironically, as I sat in one waiting to taxi, I looked around at the immaculate cabin and thought "Gee, they sure do keep these up well."
Oops.
Southwest, in conjunction with Boeing, is conducting a "high-frequency EDDY" test on 79 of the 737-300's, which can find fuselage cracks the naked eye can't see. So far, three aircraft have been identified as having cracks.
This isn't a first. In 2009, a Southwest flight developed a 'football-size' hole in flight. That plane also landed safely, was repaired, and back in the fleet within a week (it still is). But Southwest is calling this weekend's issue "a new and unknown issue", suggesting the tear that happened on this flight was in an area previously not thought to be vulnerable.
Why is this happening? Lots of people are pointing out that Southwest runs their aircraft hard. They operate over 3,400 flights a day using 548 aircraft which make an average SIX stops per day. For example, my flight was a single leg of a day-long journey that the aircraft started in Baltimore, then Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago, Nashville, and Albany. All done with roughly 30-minute turnarounds at each stop.
All those takeoffs and landings means a lot of compression and decompression of the aircraft, which is hard on the fuselage.
So it'll be interesting to see if this incident leads to a new issue being confirmed and inspections expand to other carriers.
Some are speculating on that, but nobody's officially suggesting it
Yet.
