Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about the
low-price airline Allegiant Air, which is now making flight cancellations
because it urgently needs to check the evacuation slides of its MD-80 aircraft.
Why such a problem all of a sudden, when other airlines don't have problems with
the same type of aircraft? This is where the story gets interesting.
One of its aircrafts needed an emergency evacuation after a
minor incident, and the pilot ordered passengers to slide down the evacuation
slides. The evacuation went without problems except for one thing: slides are
supposed to inflate automatically when the door opens in an emergency, but only
two of the four slides did. The other two had to be inflated manually by flight
attendants. (I am assuming that manual inflation means pushing a button, not
blowing air into the slide.) Half the slides not opening as they are supposed
to is unusual, and the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) quickly found out that the
slides had not been inspected annually, as is required for older slides. The
airline promised to fix its slides immediately, leading to the grounding of 34
planes that needed slide inspection or replacement.
Why did Allegiant Air not inspect its slides? Actually it
did inspect them, at the three-year interval recommended for newer slides. This
was their routine, where routine is a behavior that an organization repeatedly
does to address an issue. Common features of routines are that they are easy to
do because the organization is experienced with them, and they are not checked
because people in the organization believe they are the correct set of actions.
But routines can be wrong, like when the calendar for inspecting slides is
marked with every third year instead of every year.
Wrong routines are hard to fix because something needs to
tell the organization that there is a problem, and that “something” is often an
accident. That almost happened to Allegiance, but fortunately their airplane evacuation
was not hurried and did not fail. Instead, they were told of the problem by two
other mechanisms that often interrupt harmful routines. One is to document the
correct action, as Boeing has done for the MD-80 slides (McDonnell Douglas was the
original maker, but Boeing now has the documentation). The other is to
communicate the correct action, as the FAA did when it suspected that the
incorrect inspection interval had been followed.
Thanks to these actions, Allegiance Airlines evacuation
slides for MD-80 planes should soon be in good shape. Of course, there are lots
of airplane parts and airlines, so learning about such an incorrect routine is worrying
for those who fly frequently.
Carey, S. 2013. Allegiant Air Forced to Ground Some Planes. Wall Street Journal.
