Over the summer the FAA launched a safety audit of Southwest Airlines. This came after the airline came within feet of the water while still miles from Tampa less than a month after another of the airline’s 737s descended to just over 500 feet while still 9 miles out from the Oklahoma City airport.

In April, a Southwest Airlines flight in Hawaii came within 400 feet of the Pacific Ocean. Then in June a Southwest Airlines flight took off from a closed runway

Southwest has shared internally some of the issues that FAA inspectors have flagged during the Certificate Holder Evaluation Process Safety Audit.

I suppose some of these are better than the pilots who spent a flight watching video feed of passengers in the lavatory?

The airline declined comment since “[t]he CHEP is still underway” except to say that the airline “proactively shares safety information such as this with Employees as part of its Safety Management System.”

The FAA’s Office of Inspector General has previously found that the agency “has not effectively overseen Southwest Airlines’ systems for managing safety risks.”

FAA learned in 2018 that the carrier regularly and frequently communicated incorrect aircraft weight and balance data to its pilots—a violation of FAA regulations and an important safety issue. Southwest Airlines also operates aircraft in an unknown airworthiness state, including more than 150,000 flights on previously owned aircraft that did not meet U.S. aviation standards—putting 17.2 million passengers at risk.

In both cases, the carrier continues operating aircraft without ensuring compliance with regulations because FAA accepted the air carrier’s justification that the issues identified were low safety risks.

Second, FAA inspectors do not evaluate air carrier risk assessments or safety culture as part of their oversight of Southwest Airlines’ SMS. This is because FAA has not provided inspectors with guidance on how to review risk assessments or how to evaluate and oversee a carrier’s safety culture. As a result, FAA cannot provide assurance that the carrier operates at the highest degree of safety in the public’s interest, as required by law.

Since the start of the pandemic, the FAA ‘closed’ 9 of 11 recommendations to address deficiencies in monitoring Southwest Airlines safety. However five years later there are still outstanding items that the FAA has agreed are problems but have not been fixed.

United has just come out from under a safety audit, with the FAA announcing that it found no significant issues. Air traffic control, though, may be the current most critical vulnerability.