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Southwest whistle-blowers testify

The agency threatened and ignored two safety workers, one told a House panel.

WASHINGTON - The whistle-blowers who exposed maintenance and inspection problems at Southwest Airlines Inc. told Congress their jobs were threatened and their reports of noncompliance were ignored for years by their superiors.

Federal Aviation Administration inspector Douglas Peters choked up yesterday at a hearing and needed a few sips of water to tell lawmakers about how a former manager came into his office, commented on pictures of Peters' family being most important, and then said his job could be jeopardized by his actions.

Rep. James Oberstar (D., Minn.) said FAA managers' actions displayed "malfeasance bordering on corruption," adding that if presented to a grand jury, the evidence would result in an indictment.

The FAA last month took the rare step of ordering the audit of maintenance records at all domestic carriers after reports of missed safety inspections at Southwest, which is based in Dallas. The airline was hit with a record $10.2 million fine for continuing to fly dozens of Boeing 737s that had not been inspected for cracks in their fuselages.

Both FAA whistle-blowers - Charalambe Boutris and Peters - said the agency viewed the airlines as its "customers" instead of companies to be regulated. They said that the FAA's chief maintenance inspector at Southwest, Douglas T. Gawadzinski, knowingly allowed Southwest to keep planes flying that put passengers at risk and that another inspector knew of the problem and did nothing.

Gawadzinski is still employed by the FAA, but he has no responsibility for safety decisions, said Nicholas Sabatini, the agency's associate administrator for aviation safety. The FAA will "take whatever action the law will allow" when the investigation into the Southwest episode is complete, he added.

Gawadzinski was not asked to testify at yesterday's hearing because he was considered to be a hostile witness who would most likely refuse to answer questions that could have incriminated him, according to a spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Committee Chairman Oberstar said that, as long as the FAA viewed the airlines as customers, "that culture of safety will not take hold and is not going to permeate the organization."

Herb Kelleher, Southwest's cofounder and executive chairman, testifying seven hours into the hearing, acknowledged that airline employees "screwed up" by not grounding some of its 737s when it found inspections had not been done. But he disputed those who say that not following the procedures meant that the Southwest was operating unsafe planes.

Kelleher said Southwest's own experience with 737 jets, which make up its entire fleet, led to working with Boeing Co. to develop the regulations that require inspections of fuselages for minute cracks. Southwest also has replaced over many years pieces of the planes' fuselages that were involved in an Aloha Airlines accident in 1988, he said. There is no chance that its 737s would develop the same kind of cracks today that led to that accident, he said.

Southwest chief executive officer Gary C. Kelly said that what the airline failed to do was inspect a small area of the fuselages but that it was not true that its fleet was not inspected regularly.