Southwest grounds planes for fuselage cracks

[Eclipse]

http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/2011/04/04/southwest-grounds-three-boeing-737-300s-with-cracks/



After the "issue" with the skylight on a flight from Phoenix to Sacramento lats week.  Looks like at least 79 planes
have been grounded for cracks during post-mishap inspections.

I was wondering if there was any public database of tail numbers to commercial flights.  I was on a Southwest flight
twice last week from ORD to MCC and it would be interesting to know if I was on that plane.

I know I will note the tail number from now on.

[HGjunkie]

I was on 2 3 SW planes last week because I was travelling... come to think of it, I never found out what the maintenance problems were on the second flight that they made us switch...

[DC]

Does anyone know if this is limited to Southwest, or a larger issue with the 737-300 fleet?

IIRC a SW jet had a similar issue back in July of 2009. I don't recall what variant 737 it was.

[PHall]

Does anyone know if this is limited to Southwest, or a larger issue with the 737-300 fleet?

IIRC a SW jet had a similar issue back in July of 2009. I don't recall what variant 737 it was.

737's with more then 30,000 cycles (i.e. takeoff and landing) on them. SWA's short flights results in them running up the cycles pretty quickly.

[Eclipse]

The news article said this one has upwards of 89,000 cycles on it because of those short hops.

So there's nowhere to cross-ref tails to flights?  Somebody must keep those records.

[bosshawk]

Southwest!!!!  As far as I know, the FAA only keeps the flight number.

[a2capt]

The flight # is all that the FAA tracks. The cycles are tracked like engine hours, with the airframe.  Try looking up a CAP flight on FlightAware, you won't find a tail # / registration data. We, like the airlines, get assigned that call sign and it's now our responsibility to deal with doling out the numbers. Ours are pretty much fixed to the registration number, but the airlines assign them to the route, not the airframe.


http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CPF498


(Yes, I now cpF).. I still check all variants when doing ramp / flight checks when during a SAREX they say "one of yours is missing.. " "and we're not sure, figure out which one it is" (and you have 15 planes up)


All variants means, "tail #, CAPF, CAP, CPF, etc.. " despite the change from CAPFlight to CAP, .. they still use all of them.