Federal investigators have not yet come up with an explanation for how a football-size hole ruptured in the top of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-500 fuselage during a flight last week. There were no injuries when a portion of the fuselage opened up, rapidly decompressing the cabin and forcing the plane, traveling from Nashville to Baltimore, to make an emergency landing in West Virginia, ABC News reported. Investigators cut out the damaged section of the fuselage – an area measuring about two feet on each side – to inspect the aluminum, but did not note any obvious signs of fatigue or corrosion. The 15-year-old jet has logged about 42,000 cycles. Following the emergency landing, Southwest inspected all of its 500-series 737s overnight, but did not find problems with any of them. Continental Airlines, which also flies a handful of that model, inspected its planes as well.

Southwest Airlines will step up its maintenance inspection practices and pay the FAA $7.5 million in fines over the next two years as part of a sweeping settlement with the agency. The FAA initially fined the airline $10.2 million a year ago for skipping fuselage inspections on some of its older planes while continuing to fly them; six of those planes had fuselage cracks, Bloomberg reported. The record-setting settlement requires Southwest to increase the number of people verifying work at outside repair shops and to give them more access to maintenance records. The revelations on skipped fuselage inspections sparked a scandal that rippled throughout the FAA and the airline industry. Congressmen blasted the FAA for being too cozy with airlines as evidence emerged that mid-level managers squelched would-be whistleblowers. And numerous other airlines grounded hundreds of planes to conduct various inspections that may not have been carried out correctly the first time around. Southwest must pay its fine in three installments between now and January 2011; it will be the largest fine collected by the FAA.

Blame an automatic, computerized check of the Airbus A320’s nose wheel steering for the 2005 emergency landing of a JetBlue flight in Los Angeles that was broadcast on live television. Every time the nose gear retracted into the landing gear bay, the plane’s systems would quickly rotate the gear partway to ensure that it was steering correctly – and that led to the fatigue of four critical pieces that helped keep the nose wheel aligned, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Over time those pieces, known as anti-rotation lugs, fatigued from the repeated steering checks, the NTSB said in its probable cause report last week of the Sept. 21, 2005, emergency landing. The lugs fractured and separated when the crew raised the landing gear on takeoff from Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport. Following an alert from the cockpit displays, the crew lowered the gear again. But with the nose wheel now askew, the plane’s braking system detected an error and disabled the nose wheel hydraulics, making it impossible to straighten it out. The plane landed safely at Los Angeles International Airport with the nose wheel 90 degrees to the side. The skidding wheel caught fire and about half of the nose wheel rims were ground down as the plane slowed, but there were no injuries. Since the 2005 accident, Airbus has changed the computerized checks so that such a problem would no longer occur.

It is the biggest deal of its kind in the United States to turn a commercial airport over to a private company. Last week Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley agreed to lease Midway Airport to a group of investors for 99 years, bringing the city $2.5 billion, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. Of the proceeds, $1.5 billion will go to paying off some of the city’s debt on the airport. Another $900 million will be spent on an undetermined list of local infrastructure projects, and the rest is up to the mayor to spend. The buyers of Midway include Vancouver Airport Services, a British Columbia company that owns about a dozen airports worldwide. Once the handover is complete, critics worry travelers could see price hikes at Midway on everything from parking to sandwiches and sodas. While many large airports across the world have been privatized in the last 20 years, only a few small airports in the United States have, including Stewart Airport in New York.

This year was the worst on record for commercial airline delays throughout the country, prompting the FAA to institute flight caps at Kennedy International Airport in New York. JFK has been the root of many of those delays, with chronic over-scheduling and a lack of runway capacity backing up flights across the nation on some days. Incidents like the Feb. 14 ice storm that shut down JFK and left hundreds of passengers stranded in planes on the tarmac gave commercial aviation a bad name for many. There were some bright spots, though. Ultra low-cost carrier Skybus started up service from a hub in Columbus, Ohio, with flights to airports sometimes far away from the cities it claimed to serve. With the first ten seats on each flight priced at $10, the airline quickly gained a following. Virgin America finally started flying in 2007 out of its San Francisco hub after resolving the federal government’s concerns that too much of the airline was owned by a foreign company. The planes feature seatback entertainment options and colored mood lighting, among other perks. After a false start several years ago with Boeing’s Connexion program,
several airlines this year started testing in-flight wireless Internet access. The trend appears to be catching on, with JetBlue, Virgin America, Alaska Airlines and other domestic carriers launching, testing or expanding the service in 2008. Each airline is handling it differently, with some charging for the service and others providing some options, like instant messaging and e-mail access, for free.