Southwest Airlines continues to fly airplanes with safety concerns while federal officials do a poor job overseeing the airline, a government watchdog said Tuesday. The airline has flown more than 150,000 flights on 88 jets it bought on the used-plane market and which had unconfirmed maintenance histories, the Transportation Department’s inspector general said in a report. In 2017, FAA inspectors began finding “potentially serious gaps” in Southwest’s process for verifying the condition of the planes, including major repairs that weren’t documented and maintenance records that didn’t meet FAA standards.
