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Itineraries

Pilots Fault Allegiant on Safety as Talks Stall

Allegiant has succeeded by keeping costs low and tickets cheap, but the airline’s pilots question whether its policies create hazards.Credit...David Becker/Associated Press

For the last decade, Allegiant Air has built a thriving business buying secondhand jets and connecting small cities to leisure destinations like Las Vegas and Honolulu.

By keeping costs low, offering cheap fares and flying from places that other carriers have neglected, like Fort Wayne, Ind., or Allentown, Pa., Allegiant has grown rapidly. Today, the airline has one of the highest profit margins in the business and among the lowest costs.

But Allegiant’s scrappy success is now being questioned by its pilots, who say they are worried about repeated mechanical problems with the airline’s fleet of older planes, poor maintenance operations and a culture where profits come before safety.

The conflict between the pilots and the airline’s chairman and chief executive, Maurice J. Gallagher Jr., has become increasingly tense in the last two years. Negotiations on a contract have stalled, and the pilots recently threatened to strike.

It is not unusual for pilots to bring up safety and maintenance issues during labor talks. To the airline, the complaints represent scare tactics by the pilots’ union, driven by demands over benefits and work rules.

Since it was founded in 1997, Allegiant has focused on reining in costs. It subcontracts all but the most routine maintenance, for instance. It also buys older planes, which keeps ownership costs down. Last year, the company’s operating margin was about 14 percent, second only to that of Spirit Airlines, which was 18 percent.

Traditional airlines generally post margins in the low single digits.

This low-cost model has also led to tensions with Allegiant’s work force. The dispute with the pilots, for instance, began after they voted for union representation two years ago.

It is playing out in United States District Court in Nevada, where pilots contend that the airline has unlawfully scaled back their benefits and tightened work rules and shut them out of voluntary safety programs that are common at other carriers. Amid this simmering tension, Allegiant pilots said they had identified at least 65 incidents from September to March where flights were forced to divert to another airport, return to the gate or abort a takeoff because of a mechanical or an engine problem.

At least four times, engines shut down in flight, the pilots said. The list of problems includes planes that lost their communications equipment, hydraulic leaks, engines that failed to deliver sufficient power, inoperative cockpit panel lights and pressurization problems, they said.

One airplane had repeated problems, including the loss of cockpit automation, before it was taken out of service for repairs.

All the claims were reported by the pilots and compiled by the Teamsters Aviation Mechanics Coalition on behalf of the pilots’ union, the Airline Professionals Association Teamsters Local 1224.

Their report concluded that poorly trained mechanics, insufficient spare parts and an aging fleet were “creating a dangerous paradigm that could eventually lead to an accident resulting in serious injury and loss of life.”

Allegiant’s pilots recently threatened to strike to force the company to restore previous work rules. Union officials denied they were making the safety accusations to gain leverage in negotiations. Some aviation safety specialists said the number of issues should raise red flags at the Federal Aviation Administration.

“For a small fleet, that’s an awful lot of problems,” said John Goglia, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board. “They are running on the safety margin.”

Allegiant called the accusations “absurd.” Mechanics inspect its planes every night, it said. The airline said it also had an analysis and surveillance program, as well as a reliability program, to monitor the fleet’s health and performance and shares its data with the Federal Aviation Administration.

“Neither Allegiant nor the F.A.A. have identified abnormal trends,” said Jessica Wheeler, a spokeswoman for Allegiant.

Steve Harfst, the chief operating officer of the Allegiant Travel Company, which owns the airline, said in a statement: “The safety of our passengers and crew is, above all, our No. 1 priority. Allegiant has one of the best safety records among passenger airlines in the world and complies with all F.A.A. regulations.”

The F.A.A. did not address the specific issues raised by Allegiant’s pilots, but said that the agency had increased surveillance while the airline dealt with its labor issues.

The agency is “continuously monitoring, evaluating and providing oversight of Allegiant Air to ensure the carrier is capable of meeting its responsibility for safe operations,” said Laura J. Brown, a spokeswoman for the F.A.A.

Federal regulators have already looked deeply into Allegiant’s operations. In 2013, a routine F.A.A. inspection found problems with the airline’s maintenance and training programs.

The inspection, which is known as an Air Carrier Evaluation Program, led the F.A.A. to temporarily close the airline’s training programs for pilots, mechanics and flight attendants and freeze new plane deliveries until the problems were addressed. The results of the inspection have not been made public.

Among the problems the F.A.A. found was that Allegiant’s airplane repair program did not properly distinguish between “minor” and “major” repairs and did not adequately track structural defects. The F.A.A. also said Allegiant was “not effective in identifying systemic deficiencies” and found problems with the training of pilots for Boeing 757s and Airbus A320s.

Most issues were resolved within six months, according to the agency. Allegiant said that the F.A.A. found that a training manual needed to be revised, but that there was never any question or concern regarding training processes or pilot qualification.

John M. Cox, the chief executive of Safety Operating Solutions, and a former safety official at the Air Line Pilots Association, said tense labor negotiations could often bring “rhetorical excesses” about safety. In some cases, he said, airlines and pilots can benefit by bringing in an outside auditor to review the facts and provide a dispassionate analysis of events.

“Allegiant is pretty unique because they are ultralow cost,” Mr. Cox said. “Older airplanes have more mechanical issues than newer ones. But does that make them unsafe? Absolutely not. Allegiant has had a pretty good track record.”

Union officials also assert that the airline has shut its pilots out of several safety programs that are common at many airlines, including one known as the Aviation Safety Action Program. Allegiant denies this, saying it invited pilots to the monthly meeting of its flight operations safety committee.

Allegiant, which is based in Las Vegas, operates a fleet of 70 airplanes, mostly McDonnell Douglas MD-80s, which have an average age of 22.2 years. Last year, it carried eight million passengers.

Mr. Gallagher, who is also Allegiant’s biggest shareholder, was one of four co-founders of ValuJet. He left that airline in 1997, a year after the crash of ValuJet Flight 592, when the airline merged with AirTran and changed its name. It is now part of Southwest Airlines. Mr. Gallagher declined to be interviewed.

Tom Haueter, the former director of aviation safety at the National Transportation Safety Board, said the problems highlighted by Allegiant pilots did not necessarily reflect a systemic problem with the company.

Pilots can over-report a problem, either out of an abundance of caution or because they are seeking concessions from the airline, he said. That can make the job of F.A.A. inspectors more difficult, he said.

“The truth sometimes lies in the middle,” Mr. Haueter said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pilots Fault Allegiant on Safety as Talks Stall. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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