Tarnished Wings

By John Greenwald

"We believe fundamentally that with proper maintenance and proper inspection an airplane can in fact last forever." Boeing Chairman Frank Shrontz could have been speaking for the entire airline industry when he delivered that traditional wisdom to a gathering of aviation experts in Washington last month. But just two days later, a cargo door and part of the skin tore away from a 19-year-old Boeing 747 shortly after it left Hawaii, sucking nine passengers from the plane. Investigators have not yet officially determined the cause of the failure, but they have focused on the possibility of a faulty door lock.

The tragedy aboard United Airlines Flight 811 was the latest of the mechanical mishaps that have raised public anxiety about the safety of U.S. jetliners. Even though the rate of airline fatalities has declined in the decade since deregulation, the U.S. airline industry has flown its jets into uncharted territory during that time. U.S. carriers have pushed their fleets longer and harder than ever, and the strains have begun to show.

Recognizing the growing concern among passengers and Washington lawmakers, the aviation industry issued a report last week calling for a sweeping overhaul of its older planes. The $800 million renovation would help rejuvenate the 3,300-jet U.S. fleet, which averages 13 years of service per jetliner and is the oldest in the non-Communist world. The industry report, prepared by a task force of public and private experts, urged carriers to repair or replace critical parts on 1,300 vintage Boeing aircraft. The study, launched after a large section of fuselage ripped off an Aloha Airlines 737 last April, pertained to Boeing 727, 737 and 747 models that are at least 20 years old or have made some 20,000 flights. Later this year the task force will call for separate modifications for McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed aircraft.

The refurbishing, which is expected to receive swift approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, represents a sharp break with past airline- industry practices. In recommending the changes, safety experts tacitly acknowledged that more repairs and replacement should be done automatically as a plane ages rather than after inspections reveal problems. "Everybody in the industry is on the alert now," says Jerome Lederer, founder of the Virginia- based International Flight Safety Foundation, an aviation research group. "Aging aircraft can be a very, very serious problem."

While the airlines insisted their jets are already airworthy, they nonetheless welcomed the industry-sponsored report. Besides adding an extra margin of safety, the measures could head off more stringent Government regulations and help the carriers defend themselves against potential lawsuits for negligence. The repairs, which would range from replacing rivets to reskinning entire jets, could be good for business too. Passengers may find some reassurance in the program, even though they will pay for it in the form of higher fares.

Age and maintenance have become the two safety factors that passengers worry about most. Last week calls from nervous consumers poured into the offices in Alexandria, Va., of Airline Passengers of America, a consumer-advocate group. "They have been asking how they can find out the age of an airplane," said spokesman David Jeffrey. (To get an idea, a consumer can ask an airline what type of plane is used on a route and the average age of such jets in its fleet.)

In a TIME survey conducted last week by the opinion-research firm Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, the adults polled were about evenly divided over whether air travel today is very safe (42%) or not very safe (43%), but a majority see an ominous trend. Among those surveyed, 64% thought air travel is less safe than it was five years ago, compared with 20% who said air safety has improved. Asked what factors have increased the hazards of flying, those interviews cited old planes and poor maintenance as the No. 1 and No. 2 problems, followed by terrorism and a shortage of air-traffic controllers. They were less concerned about airport overcrowding, labor disputes and pilot error.

A succession of tragedies and vivid close calls, some of them the result of mechanical failure, have given passengers plenty to think about as they sit on the runway waiting their turn to take off:

-- Just before Christmas, a bomb shattered a Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and eleven on the ground.

-- In January, 44 passengers died in a crash in England when the flight crew of a new British Midland 737 apparently shut down the wrong engine after the other one malfunctioned.

-- A 14-inch hole tore open in the fuselage of a 22-year-old Eastern Air Lines 727 during a flight in December, forcing the pilot to descend from a height of 31,000 ft. for an emergency landing in Charleston, W. Va.

-- An engine fell off an eight-year-old Piedmont Airlines 737 in January as it took off from Chicago's O'Hare Airport. The plane returned safely.

In the most recent tragedy, the problem may have been spotted before the mishap but not fixed. Last July the FAA ordered all operators of the 614 747s in service to inspect cargo-door locks and modify them if necessary. The door that blew off United's jet had been covered by the notice, but the airline had until the end of 1989 to strengthen the lock. (Last week the FAA issued an emergency order requiring airlines to make the repairs within 30 days.) Experts are considering, among other possibilities, whether the uncorrected latch problem may have caused the door to come loose, tearing the fuselage skin as the door blew off the aircraft. Last week investigators located the general area in which the door hit the water but have not yet decided whether they will try to retrieve it from a depth of 16,800 ft. United plans to rebuild the shattered 747 (tail number N4713U) if the plane is salvageable, and return it to service.

While the latch problem may not have been directly related to the plane's age, newer aircraft generally need less maintenance than older jets. Most of the major carriers, especially the profitable ones, are upgrading their fleets as fast as the aircraftmakers can build them. United took delivery of 23 new Boeing 737-300s in the second half of 1988, thus lowering the average age of its 400-jet fleet from 14.9 years in July to 13.5 years as of Jan. 1. The American fleet, which averaged 10.8 years old last July, has been reduced to 9.4 years currently and is scheduled to be 8.4 years by 1992.

Cash-strapped Pan Am, by contrast, cannot afford to purchase new jets. ! Instead, the airline is overhauling its 35 747s. But keeping older planes in good running order is also costly. Pan Am spends an average $815 in maintenance costs for every hour that a plane is carrying passengers, vs. $377 for Delta, which has a newer fleet and advanced maintenance equipment. Some experts and airline employees have contended that cash-strapped airlines will be tempted to skimp on maintenance. But when the FAA conducted an intensive probe of one such carrier, Eastern, no serious faults were found.

In contrast to the U.S. fleet, many foreign carriers are flying newer planes. Some airlines can well afford the investment because they can charge regulated airfares, as in Europe, or because their business has been booming, as in Asia. Lufthansa's fleet averages 7.7 years old, Swissair's 8.5 years, KLM's 8.4 years and Singapore's 4.5 years.

The rush to buy new planes has proved a mixed blessing for Boeing, the largest jet builder. The Seattle-based company, which sold 56% of the jets delivered worldwide last year, has a record $54 billion backlog of orders for 1,049 planes. But that enviable business has led to late deliveries and unaccustomed lapses in quality control. Over the past four years, the FAA has levied 14 fines totaling $245,000 against Boeing for putting faulty parts in exit doors and for other quality-control errors. The fines included a $145,000 penalty that Boeing paid last March for installing thousands of defective self-locking nuts on the flight controls of 22 of its 767 jets.

Boeing's image has not been helped by the spate of mishaps involving its planes, even though the company has not been found responsible for any since the crash of a poorly repaired Japan Air Lines 747 in 1985. Experts give the company high marks for advising airlines of potential safety problems and ways to correct them. Says Paul Turk, vice president of Avmark Inc., a leading aviation consultant: "Boeing is taking a lot of hits because most of the older jets flying are Boeings. But the facts are that the industry, and Boeing specifically, is recognizing the problems and responding."

Boeing's Shrontz pointedly defended the safety record of U.S. airlines when he spoke in Washington last month. Noting that U.S. carriers spent $6 billion to maintain their fleets in 1987, Shrontz said a typical jet receives up to ten man-hours of maintenance for each hour of flight. He also chided reporters for frequently being too quick to speculate about the cause of air accidents and too slow to point out the air industry's strengths. "Since the 1960s," he said, "there's been an 80% decline in the number of fatal accidents per million airplane miles."

Many experts were impressed by last week's industrywide call for an overhaul of potentially hazardous old planes. "It means that the industry is casting off the old standard that an aircraft could fly forever," says Najeeb Halaby, a former FAA administrator and Pan Am chairman. "Sometimes we react to accidents rather than act positively to prevent them. But we should discuss how much safer we can make the system by being pro-active and believing that the system never is safe enough. We just don't know how safe is safe."

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Washington, Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles and James Willwerth/Honolulu