and goldfarb says the technology used today to check for these cracks is not necessarily going to find all of them. it s going to be a bit of a problem to determine how many of these planes have this problem. the faa, he says, wants to retire the 737 300 fleet. southwest has canceled more than 100 flights today while emergency inspections are being completed. keeren. we want to tell people more about the 737 300 boeing. it is the oldest aircraft in southwest stable and has 171 of these. it represents nearly a third of the overall fleet and the average age, 19 years. more than half. 54% had major work done to the skin. let s take a look at something else. out of those aircraft, again, they had a lot of work done to their skin, a lot of this is to prevent what they call metal fatigue. let s move on. right now we re talking about the 79 which remain grounded. they did not have upgrades. this particular plane is going to turn 15 years old in june. the ntsb says fatigue where the
if there s an issue, it s in the aging of the aircraft. well, in this case, it just came from what is known as the decheck, 11 months before. that s where they strip this plane down and go over it. no one knew to look in this area of the fuselage. it had never caused a problem before. what is the most important lesson that we need to learn from this near disaster? i think people are going to take a hard look at how airplanes age and they are not going to focus on the troubling areas that they have seen in the past. they are going to look at the whole should passengers ask the airline carrier how old is this plane i m flying on? would that be smart? let s look. we have had a very safe number of years. the past five years have been extraordinarily safe. i don t think they need to do that. but i think the air worthiness directives that will come out over the next day or so are going to drive this issue so that anyone who is flying a 737 300, 400, 500, those planes
we know there were 40,000 cycles on this southwest 737 that made the emergency landing. so it s entirely possible that will become a focus for investigators checking for cracking on planes that had high cycles on them. of course, as you know there were no injuries on this flight and everybody was then put onto another plane and they made it to sacramento. the overwhelming sense seems to be on travelers who have been inconvenienced by this, better safe than sorry. better to check the planes and make sure there isn t any cracking and then move on to your destination, but it s entirely possible that boeing may issue what s called a service bulletin urging airlines around the world to check for cracks and do so immediately and if boeing says that, look for the government to order those inspections at least here in the united states. for the most part only southwest flies the 737 300. toms, back to you. tom, thank you.
flights on saturday, several hundred on sunday, and the focus has been on the 737 300s that might have cracking. any know that they saw significant cracking on that plane that made the emergency landing on friday in yuma. the question is whether other planes might have similar types of issues underneath what s called a lap joint, that is a joint when the different plates of metal on top of the plane sit on top of each other. underneath one of the plates they found the significant amount of cracking. pre-existing cracking prior to the hole being ripped open on friday night. so southwest has now inspected and released 57 planes out of 79. 57 have now gone back into service, given a clean bill of health. they say three planes were found to have small cracks on the fuselage, so they will have to fix those. but then the question becomes might there be other planes beyond these that were designed in the same way or that had similar numbers of cycles, that is a takeoff and a landing.
spread cracking across this entire fracture surface. reporter: damages along one of the lap joints not detected in regular maintenance checks. what the issue is is that along this particular lap joint, it was not known in the industry that this was an area on airplanes of this number of cycles that those lap joints should be inspected. reporter: boeing, the maker of the 737 300, is drafting a service bulletin to require special inspections of the lap joints in all of the 737s with comparable landing and takeoff cycles. southwest airlines has returned 19 of the grounded 737 300s to service after extended inspections following friday s incidents. the ntsb said three of the jets were found to have cracks similar to those found on flight 812. over the weekend, the airline was forced to cancel at least 600 flights.