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.

FMI: www.mesa-air.com