JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: Alaska Air is getting a much needed boost today from federal regulators who questioned the airline's maintenance practices. CNN's Carl Rochelle joins us from FAA headquarters. Carl, this new just out. What is it?</s>CARL ROCHELLE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jeanne, the FAA has given Alaska Airlines a clean bill of health. You may recall earlier this month the airline was put on notice that it might lose its authority to perform maintenance on all of its jetliners, and that could have put the airline in very serious trouble. The FAA had found some rather severe problems with the paperwork that they had carried out in the process of conducting maintenance and found that they weren't conducting maintenance along the lines required by the FAA. They gave them seven days to come up with a plan to fix the problem and said they'd have 30 days after that to carry out the plan. Well, the FAA has found the plan acceptable. Let me give you a couple of details of it: The airline committed to hire more than 130 mechanics, 82 of which were already on board; create an executive- level safety position reporting directly to the company's CEO, and filed both directors of maintenance -- filled both director of maintenance and operations positions. So they did take some steps, the FAA found the steps were acceptable. Now, this gives the airline a clean bill of health. They're going to continue to look at them for 30 more days, and the FAA says it will inspect each airplane as it comes off of the line. But if everything is OK, then Alaska has a clean bill of health all the way down the line. But interestingly, also, based on what they learned in the investigation of Alaska Air, the FAA has decided to take a closer look at nine other major airlines, a critical look at them, the FAA saying, considering the problem we found at Alaska, we thought it would be prudent to go back and evaluate how some of the other airlines are doing in the same area. I'm Carl Rochelle, CNN, reporting live from Washington.
FAA Gives Alaska Airlines Clean Bill of Health