Alaska Airlines Disputes Safety Allegations

Alaska Airlines said it was “outraged and offended” by a report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asserting that the carrier “has avoided some major [safety] fines” because certain senior government inspectors have given the airline favorable treatment. The newspaper said some inspectors who allegedly found problems at Seattle-based Alaska Airlines received “heat rather than praise from their bosses,” which let the airline sidestep penalties. But the carrier, the main unit of Alaska Air Group Inc., called the article “very inaccurate and unbalanced” and said “to suggest that we’d operate in anything but a safe manner is absolutely outrageous.” The Federal Aviation Administration in Seattle defended its inspections as being “sufficiently rigorous to help the company maintain the highest levels of safety.”