Allegiant Air draws FAA’s attention over safety concerns

Just over a year ago, Allegiant Air pilot Jason Kinzer was sitting in the cockpit of a 24-year-old McDonnell Douglas MD-80 aircraft bound for Hagerstown, Maryland, having just taken off from St. Petersburg, Florida.

As the plane climbed through 2,500 feet, a cabin attendant alerted Kinzer to a strong burning smell. Alarmed, Kinzer turned Allegiant Air Flight 864 back toward the airport. Fire and rescue crews met the plane on the runway as smoke wafted from an engine. Kinzer told the 144 passengers to disembark. He then helped a flight attendant carry a paraplegic passenger to the exit.

It seemed to be model behavior. But Allegiant Air did not praise Kinzer. It fired him.

In a dismissal letter, the airline called the evacuation of the plane “unwarranted” and faulted Kinzer as not “striving to preserve the Company’s assets, aircraft, ground equipment, fuel and the personal time of our employees and customers.” Later, the company’s attorneys would call Kinzer’s account an “inaccurate and self-serving recitation of events.”

Kinzer’s saga, now the subject of a court case in Nevada, involves one of dozens of incidents that have prompted scrutiny of the safety and maintenance practices at Las Vegas-based Allegiant Air, a low-cost carrier that has found a profitable niche by serving airports in small-to-midsize cities.

But observers with various interests and viewpoints are asking whether Allegiant has pursued fast growth and financial success at the expense of other considerations.

Unwanted attention has come from federal regulators worried about safety, investors betting against the stock and a pilots union concerned about maintenance.

About 300 pages of Federal Aviation Administration records for Allegiant show a pattern of safety problems that triggered a relatively large number of aborted takeoffs, emergency descents and emergency landings from Jan. 1, 2015, through this March. The Allegiant records were obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Robert MacArthur, owner of Alternative Research Services, a consultancy that caters to short sellers — investors who benefit when company share prices drop.

Allegiant had about nine times as many serious incidents over that period as Delta Air Lines had with similar types of planes of similar vintage — even though Delta was flying about three times as many such planes, according to a Washington Post analysis of FAA documents.

“I don’t think there’s a safety problem,” Allegiant’s chief operating officer, Jude Bricker, said in an interview. “Our unscheduled landings in particular are a result primarily of an abundance of caution, and our pilots are entitled to put their planes into landing anytime they feel unsafe.”

But leading experts said Allegiant needs to pay closer attention to its aging aircraft.

“They just have a lot of problems with leaks, doors not closing properly, things not working properly,” said Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer who served as inspector general for the Department of Transportation from 1990 to 1996. “They have electrical smells every day, which means they’ve got old wiring. It’s just kind of a poorly maintained fleet.”

Allegiant said that its “safety protocols emphasize putting the safety of passengers foremost.” And in July, the company announced it would buy 12 new Airbus A320s for delivery by 2018.

WALL STREET DARLING

The chief executive of Allegiant Air is Maurice “Maury” Gallagher Jr., who ran ValuJet until one of its planes plunged into the Florida Everglades in 1996, killing all 110 people aboard. In 1999, after ValuJet was merged into AirTran, Gallagher started building a new carrier, Allegiant Air.

The company became the darling of Wall Street. Its stock increased more than fivefold in the past decade, though it has lost nearly half its value since its peak of $234 a share last year.

Analysts hailed Gallagher’s strategy of buying older MD-80s, often for a tenth of the $40 million to $50 million its competitors were paying for new aircraft. The average age of Allegiant’s MD-80 fleet is 26.49 years.

But Allegiant has run into trouble.

Allegiant aircraft this year made unscheduled landings on Feb. 28; on March 2, 3 and 14; and twice on March 13, according to FAA documents.

On March 5, a crew aborted a takeoff after a loud bang, warning signs from the right engine and smoke in the cabin. One flight attendant was treated by emergency medical technicians for smoke inhalation.

All airlines must file reports about safety and maintenance incidents with the FAA. After Allegiant’s spate of midair incidents, the agency moved up a periodic evaluation of the airline that had been scheduled for 2018.

“The purpose of these reviews is to verify a company is complying with the applicable regulations; determine whether it is operating at the highest possible degree of safety; and identify and address any operational/safety issues,” the FAA said, although it would not comment on Allegiant.

Later, in a July 18 letter to Allegiant, the FAA said it had “identified several element design and element performance deficiencies” — such as software that did not meet FAA specifications and a failure to notice fractures in a right-engine pylon — and ordered the airline to come up with a “mitigation plan” by Sept. 30. The FAA said two findings “revealed possible regulatory issues” but did not describe them.

Gallagher said the findings of the FAA inspection were “minor or less than minor.”

“So when you send 30 people around for 90 days in any organization, they’re going to find stuff, as well they should. And we’ll respond and adjust it,” Gallagher said in a July 29 conference call with securities analysts. But he said “there’s nothing that operationally we’re going to do substantially different.”

ALLEGIANT VS. DELTA

The FAA’s Service Difficulty Reports cover issues ranging from a burned-out light bulb on a cabin exit sign to an engine failure.

The Post examined FAA reports from Allegiant for 15 months ending in March and focused on the three types of operational incidents that aviation experts deem most significant: emergency descents, unscheduled landings and aborted takeoffs.

The Post then compared Allegiant’s record with Delta’s by obtaining and reviewing reports filed by Delta for the same aircraft models for the same period.

Allegiant told the FAA that its 50 McDonnell Douglas planes — including DC-9s and MD-80s — had 50 unscheduled landings, five emergency descents and eight aborted takeoffs. From Jan. 1, 2015, through the end of March 2016, Delta reported that its 117 MD-88 aircraft had six unscheduled landings, one emergency descent and no aborted takeoffs.

For its 30 Airbus jetliners, Allegiant reported five unscheduled landings, two aborted takeoffs and one emergency descent. Delta reported that its 126 Airbus planes had one unscheduled landing, no aborted takeoffs and no emergency descents.

Allegiant’s Bricker said that “the reporting criteria [to the FAA] is open to interpretation and therefore is vastly different from fleet to fleet.”

PROLONGED NEGOTIATIONS

Allegiant says the controversy about its safety record is due in large part to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The airline’s pilots voted to join the Teamsters in 2012 and, after prolonged negotiations, reached an agreement with the company on June 21.

A company spokesman said the union had made a “significant effort” to create “negative media coverage” of Allegiant. The company said that “one of those tactics” was to issue safety reports about the fleet.

Daniel C. Wells, president of Teamsters Local 1224, said the union has issued safety reports on Allegiant for the past three years that are based on what its members have reported. Wells said the contract would “not lessen our concern about getting the safety issues fixed with Allegiant, first for our members and, of course, the flying public.”

In a statement, the company said: “Allegiant is a very safe airline. We have robust internal and external auditing programs and are investing heavily in new training programs and technologies that are industry leading.”

The company said that it is in regular contact with the FAA and added that its maintenance programs are “in accordance with all standards of the airline industry.”