NEW YORK (Reuters) – Southwest Airlines inspected one-third of its fleet Monday night after a plane made an emergency landing in West Virginia because of a one foot-wide hole that appeared in the body of the aircraft.

No other problems were found on the airline’s other Boeing 737-300 planes, said spokeswoman Marilee McInnis. Southwest operates 181 of the 737-300 model.

The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration have sent investigators to Charleston, West Virginia, to inspect the plane in Monday’s incident and determine what happened.

“We’ll look at anything the team comes up with to see if we need to take any safety action,” FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said.

Southwest inspected the planes after Flight 2294 was forced on Monday to make an emergency landing on its way to Baltimore, McInnis said. About 30 minutes after the flight left Nashville, Tennessee, the cabin lost pressure and oxygen masks dropped from overhead.

The pressure drop was caused by a hole in the plane’s fuselage.

The plane made an emergency landing and none of the flight’s 126 passengers and five crew members were injured. Another plane was deployed to pick up the travelers in Charleston.

Southwest operates more than 500 737s and agreed earlier this year to pay a $7.5 million fine to settle U.S. government allegations that it failed to perform necessary inspections for fuselage cracks in 2006-07.

Southwest has said it meets federal requirements for safety inspections.

The FAA has issued advisories in the past on the need for 737 structural inspections industrywide, but nothing has been specifically recommended for the region of the fuselage affected in Monday’s incident.

(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman and John Crawley; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Source: REUTERS