The FAA is investigating Southwest for how it measures baggage weight. (CNN Business) — The US Federal Aviation Administration is investigating how Southwest Airlines tracks the weight of checked bags on its flights. The FAA began its probe in February 2018, the FAA told CNN Business on Monday. “Since that time, the FAA has directed the development of a comprehensive solution to the methods and processes used by Southwest Airlines to determine this performance data,” the FAA said. The Wall Street Journal first reported the story. It cited FAA officials and agency documents that indicated airline employees made mistakes that caused pilots to compute the wrong weight of planes at takeoffs. The errors were described as “systemic and significant,” occasionally causing the reported takeoff weights to be 1,000 pounds lower than the plane’s actual weight. According to the FAA’s weight & balance handbook, a safety guideline for airplane operators, excess weight on an aircraft can cause a variety of problems, including the need for a higher takeoff speed, reduced cruising speeds, decreased maneuverability and higher stress imposed on landing gear. Southwest (LUV) said in a statement to CNN Business that there’s an “ongoing effort to track and voluntarily report operational data to the FAA so that we can mitigate and eliminate any operational risks.” But the airline added that it has already put in place controls and procedures to address weight and balance issues. Southwest said it has shared those measures with the FAA. “Southwest believes the controls and procedures we implemented throughout 2018 have enhanced our weight and balance program and resolved the issues that we originally reported to the FAA,” the airline added. The FAA has not linked any accidents to the weight discrepancies. But the agency said in its statement to CNN Business that it “will not close its investigation until it is satisfied that Southwest’s corrective actions are consistent and sustained.” The news of the FAA probe also comes as Southwest is grappling with an “operational emergency” due to a labor dispute with mechanics. Southwest said in a statement to CNN Business last Friday that the percentage of “out-of-service aircraft” with maintenance issues in its fleet had more than doubled in the past week. “We are requiring all hands on deck to address maintenance items so that we may promptly return aircraft to service,” a spokesperson for Southwest said in an email at the time. CNN’s Rene Marsh contributed to this report.<doc-sep>Photo : Getty For the last year, the Federal Aviation Administration has been conducting an investigation into Southwest Airlines’ practices for tracking the weight of baggage loaded onto its jets, according to documents seen by the Wall Street Journal. The regulator has reportedly considered these weight inaccuracies to be a “high-risk concern.” Advertisement According to the Journal, Southwest Airlines differs from many of its U.S. competitors in its practice of relying on its ground crew to hand count bags rather than using a computer scanner. Airlines calculate the total weight of luggage in the cargo hold by multiplying the number of bags by the average weight of a single bag. Based on internal documents between the FAA and Southwest, the Journal found that hand counts have resulted in wildly inaccurate weight estimates. From the report: The Federal Aviation Administration’s yearlong civil probe, the documents show, found systemic and significant mistakes with employee calculations and luggage-loading practices, resulting in potential discrepancies when pilots compute takeoff weights. The inaccuracies ranged from a few dozen pounds to more than 1,000 pounds in excess of what the paperwork indicated, sparking disputes between the company and some agency inspectors about potential safety consequences. ... The agency hasn’t decided whether to impose fines or any other punishment, according to people familiar with the investigation, which hasn’t been reported before. The FAA and Southwest Airlines did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Gizmodo. An FAA spokesperson told the Journal that the agency has already ordered fixes to Southwest’s procedures and it “will not close its investigation until it is satisfied that Southwest’s corrective actions are consistent and sustained.” A spokesperson for Southwest played down the investigation to the Journal saying it was a “routine dialogue” and the documents did not “constitute findings of noncompliance.” Just how big of a deal are Southwest’s miscounts of luggage weight in the cargo bay? Well, in one documented exchange with the FAA, Southwest officials said that the discrepancies were a “less than minor risk” for passengers. But the FAA’s inspectors told Southwest that in an extreme circumstance, like an engine failure during takeoff, a pilot could have trouble handling the plane if they’ve miscalculated its weight and balance. And FAA officials estimated that in some periods, at least a third of Southwest’s daily flights have taken off with inaccurate counts of luggage weight—in some cases the weight estimates were off by more than a ton. In a recent letter to the FAA, Jeff Hamlett, Southwest’s senior director of regulatory compliance, explained that the airline will soon roll out luggage scanners in Seattle, San Diego, and Sacramento. A nationwide “phased roll out ” will follow those initial test results. While the memory of a harrowing engine explosion on a Southwest 737 is still fresh in travelers’ minds, the airline still has one of the strongest safety records in the industry. Advertisement [Wall Street Journal]<doc-sep>Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- As Covid-19 continues to ravage India, financial professionals across the country are grappling with an increasingly surreal disconnect between the epidemic’s devastation and a record-breaking boom in local markets.The world’s worst coronavirus outbreak has battered India’s economy and lifted its official Covid death toll to more than 318,000 -- a figure that experts say is likely a significant undercount.And yet investors continue to snap up Indian assets, fueling a 65% rally in the Nifty 50 Index over the past 12 months that has outpaced every other major equity benchmark worldwide. The measure’s surge to a record on Thursday has coincided with the fastest rate of Indian initial public offerings since 2017 and an unprecedented flood of foreign-currency bond issuance by local companies.While the combination of pandemic pain and financial-market euphoria is hardly unique to India, nowhere else has the contrast been so extreme.Bulls say the gains are justified by central bank stimulus at home and abroad, along with signs that the current virus wave may be peaking and optimism that India’s long-term economic growth potential will emerge from the crisis intact. Skeptics point to overly rosy earnings estimates and the risk of further outbreaks in a country where vaccination rates remain stubbornly low. India’s central bank weighed in on Thursday, warning in its annual report that the surge in stocks “poses the risk of a bubble.”What’s clear is that financiers on all sides of the debate are stretched thin. Booming markets have left the industry swamped with work at a time when many employees have been sickened by the virus. Some have had to franticly search for medical help after hospitals were overrun and oxygen supplies fell short. Almost everyone has at least one friend or family member who has died.“You feel numb, as if we are in the midst of a war and are losing people one after the other,” said Vikaas Sachdeva, the Mumbai-based chief executive officer of Emkay Investment Managers Ltd., who lost four members of his extended family to the virus.Sachdeva expects Indian markets to be volatile in the near term as investors weigh uncertainties around the vaccination program and the possibility of a third wave. His firm has been buying shares of Indian companies with “high quality” management, betting that the country’s long-term investment case remains intact.India’s $2.9 trillion stock market has been buoyed in part by resilient demand from international investors, who’ve purchased a net $34.9 billion of shares over the past 12 months. While they pared holdings in April and early May, buying by local mutual funds and insurance companies has helped fill the gap. A steady decline in reported Covid cases since mid-May -- along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to avoid another nationwide lockdown -- have added weight to calls for further market gains.Indian companies have taken advantage of the exuberance in markets to raise about $4 billion via public offerings since the start of the year, on track for the busiest first-half since 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.“The IPO boom is being driven by Indian technology companies coming of age with businesses doing better than expected,” said Sunil Khaitan, India head of global capital markets at Bank of America. “Tech companies are advancing their fundraising plans and financial sponsors also believe this is a good time to bring in public market investors in these companies amidst ample global liquidity.”Khaitan expects India IPO volumes to more than double in 2021 from the previous year.The surge in activity has left some financial firms scrambling to complete deals after employees were sidelined by the virus. The head of equity capital markets at a Mumbai-based investment bank, who asked not be named discussing private matters, said that at one point 25% of his 40-person group was infected.About 200,000 Indian bank employees have been infected and 1,200 have died since the pandemic began, the industry’s largest union estimated this month.Among the biggest risks for India market optimists is another virus wave. Just 3.2% of the population has been fully vaccinated, versus 39.7% in the U.S. and 10.1% in Brazil, according to Bloomberg’s Covid-19 Tracker.The Indian economy’s recovery from last year’s recession is already showing signs of sputtering. The country lost 10 million jobs in May, according to private research firm Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt. Among the 40 companies in the Nifty 50 index that have posted quarterly results so far, more than half have missed analysts’ estimates. While India’s central bank predicts the economy will grow at a 10.5% pace this fiscal year, other forecasters including S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service have recently cut their estimates to below 10%.“If this Covid situation keeps affecting newer areas and new strains keep emerging, then there is a problem for the near term,” said Deepak Jasani, head of retail research at HDFC Securities Ltd.Sachdeva, the Emkay CEO, said Covid will impact him and his colleagues in ways that go far beyond their work in finance. He’s reading “The Difficulty of Being Good” by Gurcharan Das, who writes about his search for a meaningful life.“The pandemic has brought about a change in many of us and we are more aware of things that matter most in life,” Sachdeva said. “We would though have to see if this is indeed a permanent change when life comes back normal.”(Updates death toll in second paragraph)More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.<doc-sep>
Southwest Airlines has been under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration for a year, with the probe focused on its aircraft weight and balance calculations, a critical step before takeoff. The investigation, disclosed for the first time Monday by the Wall Street Journal, began in February 2018, FAA spokesman Gregory Martin confirmed to USA TODAY. There have been no fines nor enforcement action from the investigation to date. "Since that time, the FAA has directed the development of a comprehensive solution to the methods and processes used by Southwest Airlines to determine this (weight and balance) performance data,'' he said in a statement. "The FAA will not close its investigation until it is satisfied that Southwest’s corrective actions are consistent and sustained.'' Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King said the airline's approach to calculating weight and balance — a detailed process that factors in the weight of bags, cargo and passengers and where they are positioned on the plane to help determine things like fuel needed and takeoff and landing speeds — has served it well for its 47-year history. She said Southwest switched to a new system, approved by the FAA, in August 2017 to improve reliability, efficiencies and accuracy, and made more changes in 2018. This year, following a test at three airports in 2018, Southwest plans to start scanning each bag as it's loaded onto the plane, a process in place at other airlines. The airline's baggage handlers have been manually counting bags because Southwest's technology priority the past few years was its new reservations system. "While no system can ever be perfect, our weight and balance program is a proven, reliable system with checks and balances installed to ensure safe operations by any measure or standard,'' King said in a statement. The Journal's report, based on internal FAA documents and interviews with unnamed FAA officials, says as many as one third of Southwest's 4,000 daily flights could have operated with inaccurate weight data during certain periods due to the manual counting of bags by baggage handlers instead of computerized scanning. Southwest said there is no evidence to support that number. King also notes that safety margins are built into its system "to allow for the possibility of discrepancies and to assure performance limitations are never compromised.'' Why are aircraft weight and balance so important? Weight and balance calculations on any type of plane are critical. Weight is the total weight of passengers, bags and cargo, while balance is how it's all proportioned on the plane. There are significant risks to having an overweight or improperly balanced plane, especially in case of an emergency, said Brent Bowen, professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. He uses US Airways Flight 1549, the plane that successfully landed on the Hudson River 10 years ago after a bird strike knocked out both engines, as an example. "If that plane had been overweight, it could have stalled and spun in (to the Hudson River),'' he said. Similarly, a plane that is too heavy can cause problems if it skids toward the end of the runway during a snow or ice storm, Bowen said. "If the plane is overweight it will have difficulty stopping,'' he said. Weight and balance is also critical during extreme heat, such as the triple-digit temperatures in Phoenix in the summer. "It makes the air feel like it's at a higher altitude,'' he said. "I don't think I would be comfortable using a (baggage weight) estimate in extreme conditions.'' The Journal said the investigation was initiated after allegations were raised by a whistle blower and on an FAA hotline for safety complaints. Southwest, the nation's largest domestic carrier, says it voluntarily alerted the FAA to baggage weight discrepancies. In early 2018, when the investigation was launched, the Journal said, "the FAA told the carrier 'there have been numerous reports of ground operations personnel and/or flight operations personnel not following Southwest Airlines procedures for entering correct and complete weight information' before takeoff. One early document called it a “high-risk concern.” "The inaccuracies prompted swift FAA responses, and were considered serious enough to require Southwest to physically audit the number of bags unloaded daily from 25 percent of its flights,'' the Journal said. "That sample was later reduced, at Southwest’s request, to 15 percent. The airline continues to provide daily status reports to the agency.''