"Anyone Catch The License Plate On That Ambulance?"
Barely 24 hours after a
Southwest Airlines 737 apparently slid off a snow-covered taxiway
at Washington's Spokane International Airport, one law firm felt
compelled to call attention to what it no doubt hopes potential
clients will see as an endemic problem.
As ANN reported Monday,
Flight 485 departed a taxiway shortly after landing at GEG Sunday
afternoon, apparently due to the snow-slicked pavement caused by
nearly two days of constant snowfall. Early reports indicated the
plane might have slid off the runway, as it was turning onto the
taxiway.
It's worth noting none of the passengers or crew onboard the
airliner were injured in the slow-speed incident; and as of Monday
evening, the FAA hadn't seen fit to issue a Preliminary Report. One
law firm, however, couldn't wait until the facts of the Spokane
incident could be analyzed by expert investigators.
"Southwest flight crews have a history of undertaking similarly
risky aircraft operations," said a breathless release issued Monday
by Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, a law firm with a history of going after the Dallas-based low-cost
carrier.
"This is at least the fourth instance where a Southwest jet has
overrun a runway or ran off a taxiway in just the past few years,"
said Kreindler partner Dan Rose, who has and is currently handling
cases stemming from two other Southwest runway overruns. "It
continues to raise serious safety concerns about Southwest's
operations and culture."
According to the law firm, Southwest's "operations and culture"
may also point to responsibility for three other runway and/or
taxiway excursions, one of them fatal -- the December 8, 2005
overrun at Chicago's Midway Airport, when Southwest Airlines Flight
1248 was landing in a snowstorm and skidded off the runway. The
skidding plane exited the airport grounds and impacted a car,
killing six-year-old Joshua Woods.

To date, the Midway incident is the carrier's only fatality in
its nearly 37-year history.
As ANN reported, the National
Transportation Safety Board determined in October 2007 the probable
cause of the overrun was the pilot's failure to use available
reverse thrust in a timely manner to safely slow or stop the
airplane after landing... and recommended all airlines review new
procedures for bringing aircraft to a safe stop on slick
runways.
"Similar weather conditions to the ones in Spokane prevailed at
time of [the Midway] incident," according to the law firm...
despite the fact shortly after the incident Sunday, GEG spokesman
Todd Woodard pointedly noted "we don't have any ice on the runway;
we were pretty vigilant about that."
The law firm also notes two other incidents in which Southwest
jets left the runway on landing -- one in Amarillo, TX in May 2003,
and the infamous runway overrun in Burbank, CA in March 2000 (shown
below.)

"When are they going to learn?" asks Jim Chalupsky, who the law
firm states is a "survivor" of the Chicago Midway accident (one of
103) and current Kreindler & Kreindler LLP client.
One could ask the same question of this apparent rush to
judgment... at least until an official investigation weighs in on
the cause of the incident at Spokane International.