Air Follies

By Gordon Bock

Public confidence in airline safety, already shaky, got another pair of rough jolts last week. First the Federal Aviation Administration asked carriers to inspect 330 Boeing 747 jumbo jets now in operation for possible fuel leaks that could cause fires in the cargo hold. The directive came after several serious complaints from Japan Air Lines and British Airways about quality- control problems in Boeing planes were made public. Then the FAA announced a sweeping investigation of Texas Air, the largest U.S. airline company (with 20% of the nation's air traffic). The agency has launched a new search for safety violations at Texas Air's Eastern Air Lines and pledged to take the unusual step of looking at the parent company's financial records to see if its economic woes are compromising passenger welfare.

For more than two years, the FAA has been pressuring Eastern to improve its aircraft maintenance, but the agency is still not satisfied. In the next month, FAA inspectors will go over all 267 planes in the carrier's fleet. The agency disclosed that of the 60 aircraft checked so far, six have been at least temporarily grounded by Eastern so that repairs can be made. As a result of previous inspections, the FAA proposed to fine the airline $823,000 for recurring maintenance violations.

FAA officials fear that money may be at the root of Eastern's maintenance difficulties. Texas Air, which also runs Continental, lost $466 million last year on revenues of $8.5 billion. Some of Eastern's pilots and mechanics charge that the carrier skimps on repair work to save cash.

Texas Air responds that such allegations are a ploy used by Eastern labor unions in their ongoing fight with management. In current contract talks with Eastern machinists, Texas Air Chairman Frank Lorenzo is seeking wage cuts of as much as 60%. Company officials say the workers are publicly bad-mouthing Texas Air to force Lorenzo to back off. In full-page newspaper ads last week, Eastern claimed that it outspent all its rivals on maintenance ($500 million last year).

More surprising than Eastern's continuing troubles are the snafus at Boeing, long acclaimed as one of America's premier manufacturers. The company's business is booming, but its flat-out production schedule is suspected of putting a strain on quality control. The discovery of a fuel leak on a JAL 747-200 (later traced to a faulty bolt) led to the FAA's call last week for inspections of the Boeing planes.

The Japanese carrier has made public other major foul-ups as well. In one of its new 747s, the temperature gauges had been wired so that overheating in engine No. 1 showed up on the gauge labeled engine No. 4. In an emergency, the pilot might have shut down the wrong engine and made matters worse. In five of JAL's 767s, the fire-suppression system in the cargo holds was incorrectly installed. When activated, the system would spray fire-retarding Halon gas into the wrong area. As Boeing studies its quality-control procedures, Dean Thornton, president of its commercial-plane division, vows, "If there is something wrong, we will fix it."

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles