I think Southwest is missing an opportunity to effectively come clean on this recent story that they let 46 of the planes fly beyond the FAA mandated amount of per plane flights to have an inspection. They’re using “spinspeak” when they don’t have to.
The issue is muddled. The level of responsiblity is unclear. The nexus of blame looks to be dispersed. Southwest needs to open up a bit more. Instead, they obfuscate.
“The FAA has issued what is called a “letter of penalty” to Southwest Airlines regarding one of many routine, redundant, and overlapping inspections of our fleet. The specific inspection in question involves an extremely small area in one of many overlapping inspections designed to detect early signs of skin cracking on our aircraft.”
“Many, routine, redundant, and overlapping inspections”…”extremely small area in one of manyh ovrlapping inspections”. Please.
Meanitme, one can simply read any news coverge of this and find out that the airline went well past the alloted amount of flights. By trying to sound “reasonable”, they cause people to look elsewhere. And the term “overlapping inspections”…what they hell does that mean?
Most of the rest of what they say if fine. But in the interest of transparency, simply explain the concept of inspections based upon amount of flights. THEN you add how you found the problem and quickly notified the authorities. Keep the bulk of the story on the blog itself. Off an apology for the confusion. Thank people for their loyalty. Let them know that you’ll keep them informed via the blog. Have CEO Gary Kelly post an entry a week until the situation resolves itself.
Right now there’s a bunch of responsed showing doubt towards Southwest. And there’s a significant amount of supportive responses. Some very elaborate. Allmost seems organized, but they’re not cookie cutter. And y0u’ve got some who are defending the company by attacking the media. Saying that the media doesn’t know what they’re talking about…that the media is blowing things out of proportion. On what they’re basing this I don’t know.
Southwest has 30 days to respond to the FAA’s letter of inquiry. Let’s see how it turns out.
No Comments » Posted on March 10th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn
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