On Crash Anniversary, Airline Resumes Own Maintenance
Air Midwest, the
commuter airline whose plane crashed on takeoff in Charlotte 13
months ago, killing all 21 aboard, will stop outsourcing routine
maintenance on its aircraft.
NTSB investigators believe mechanics in Huntington (WV), working
under contract for Air Midwest made mistakes that contributed to
the deadly crash. Under federal regulations, Air Midwest was
responsible for the outsourced maintenance on US Airways Express
Flight 5481, which crashed on Jan. 8, 2003. The NTSB will present
its conclusions on Thursday in Washington about what caused the
crash. The board will likely focus on maintenance and the plane's
weight and balance.
"After an accident like that, you reassess," said Jonathan
Ornstein, chief executive of Air Midwest's parent company, Mesa Air
Group. Bringing maintenance back in-house is cost-effective and
provides the airline more direct control, he said. Within months,
the airline will again do all of its own routine, overnight
maintenance, an airline spokesman said. A contractor will continue
to do heavy structural repairs.
Since 2000, when Air Midwest began outsourcing much of its
maintenance, the airline had more reported maintenance and
mechanical problems than many airlines its size.
According to the
Associated Press, from 2000 to mid-2003, Air Midwest had 72
incidents reported to the FAA, more than any other regional airline
and more than five much-larger major airlines. More than 60 of the
reported incidents involved mechanical problems. In 22 cases,
landing gear or landing gear indicators malfunctioned. Ten cases
involved things other than mechanical problems, such as pilot error
and lightning strikes.
During the same period, about 6.2 percent of 2,400 FAA
maintenance inspections at Air Midwest resulted in an enforcement
investigation or follow-up action, the newspaper's analysis found.
The AP asserts that was higher than all but two of 12 other
regional airlines carrying comparable numbers of passengers. Air
Midwest, based in Wichita (KS), said it has been aggressive about
identifying problems and reporting them to the FAA. Federal
regulations allow for different interpretations of what should be
reported, and the airline's policy is to disclose even minor
problems, airline spokesmen said.
"Air Midwest disputes that any negative inferences can be drawn
from events disclosed to the FAA given the fact that Air Midwest
has adopted internal procedures favoring disclosure regardless of
how minor an incident might have been," the airline said in a
statement to The Observer.
Air Midwest said a number of proposed enforcement actions were
either withdrawn by the FAA or resolved with no finding of
violation. The airline also noted that until 2003 it had operated
more than 6 million flights without a crash.
Air Midwest, which
operates under contract with larger airlines, including US Airways,
did its own maintenance from its inception in 1965 until 2000. In
February 2000, the airline won the FAA's highest maintenance
training honor. Air Midwest hired a contractor to help maintain its
Beech 1900 turboprops as it took over new East Coast routes in
2000. The next year, the airline contracted with Raytheon
Aerospace, a corporation partly owned by the parent company of
Raytheon Aircraft, which manufactured the Beech 1900. Mesa believed
Raytheon would provide excellent service, Ornstein said.
"It's like bringing your car to the dealer for maintenance,"
Ornstein said. "It wasn't like we went to some corner garage."
Months after the crash, Vertex Aerospace, stopped working on Air
Midwest's planes, saying the business was not profitable. Since
then, Air Midwest has shut down its Huntington maintenance base and
has moved the work to Dubois (PA). The airline said the move is
unrelated to the crash.