Holed Southwest Airlines flight makes emergency landing

[gimpy117]

Originally Posted by CCIP

And yeah, I agree - none of this would make me hesitate to fly with them. All things considered, it seems like even with the failure, everything worked as designed - everyone's down safe and we're not looking at a 'convertible'.

see I'm not so sure. Catastrophic failures like this should not happen Unless somebody is doing things carelessly or just wrong. The 737 has been flying long enough to know exactly how much those airframes can take. The fact that that 737 had its airframe blow up tells me that they are doing something wrong. Even more scary is that all the airframes have probably been flown the same way, and kept up the same way...so 737's of that age could all be effected by the same problem. Its been a known pattern, for example, then that engine separated from a DC-10 at o'hare in 1979 they found many other aircraft in the fleet had the same problems from poor maintainance. The FAA knows this could be a problem...and Southwest knows this too..thats why the fleet is grounded. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if more are found to be near failure.