A Storm-Damaged Southwest Jet Flew 44 Times Before Its Tail Started to Sway

The National Transportation Safety Board has published its final report on a 2024 incident in which a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 began rocking side to side at cruising altitude. The trouble started on the ground. On May 16, 2024, gusts of up to 84 mph struck the parked jet in New Orleans during a line of storms. The rudder has no gust lock, and investigators found the wind likely damaged the structure that supports the standby rudder power control unit.

The plane went back into service without any special inspection and flew 44 flights with the damage undetected. On May 23, at Houston Hobby, a standby hydraulic test was signed off as passed, even though hangar video later showed the rudder moving right but not left, and nobody had been watching the tail. Two days later, on May 25, Flight 746 from Phoenix to Oakland, carrying 175 passengers and six crew, went into a Dutch roll at about 34,000 feet. It landed safely, and no one was hurt.

A Dutch roll is a combined yawing and rolling motion, and here the rudder oscillated in bursts lasting about 20 seconds. The captain later described a small amount of Dutch roll. Inspectors found fractured ribs in the vertical stabilizer and a damaged support bracket, and the NTSB classed the damage as substantial. It blamed the improper test, the lack of any wind threshold for inspections in Boeing’s manual, and Southwest’s lack of a process for flagging parked jets hit by extreme wind. It did not cite a design flaw.

Both companies have already made changes. Southwest inspected its entire MAX fleet and found no similar damage, introduced a step-by-step signed work card for the hydraulic test, and now alerts maintenance control when parked aircraft face extreme winds. Boeing now requires an inspection whenever a parked aircraft is exposed to winds of 75 mph or more. For passengers, the report is reassuring in one respect: the system that caught the problem was the flight crew, and the jet landed normally.

Sources: Men’s Journal, AeroCorner