The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday ordered U.S. airlines to stop flying some Boeing 737 Max 9 planes until they were inspected, after one of those planes lost a piece of its body in the air, terrifying passengers until it The plane landed safely.
Alaska and United Airlines on Saturday began canceling dozens of flights after grounding their Max 9 fleets so the planes could undergo federally required inspections.
The Max 9 involved in Friday’s incident had taken off from Portland, Oregon, as Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, bound for Ontario, California. The plane returned to Portland about 20 minutes after takeoff and no one on board was seriously injured. Those on board described the wind blowing through a huge hole that showed the night sky and city lights below.
Although the FAA has not yet publicly discussed what caused the episode, it ordered airlines to inspect what it called a “mid-cabin door plug.”
Some of the Boeing 737 Max 9s are configured with fewer seats than the maximum possible and therefore do not need all the exits originally designed for the aircraft. Those unnecessary doors are filled with a plug. The plane on Flight 1282 had two of these covered doors, located between the rear of the plane and the emergency exits on the wing.
Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency charged with investigating air crashes, said a door plug on the plane came loose 10 minutes from the airport while the plane was at an altitude of about 16,000 feet. .
The door stopper was located near seats A and B in row 26, which were empty, Homendy said Saturday at a news conference in Portland. He also said the outcome could have been much worse if it had occurred at cruising altitudes, with seat belts possibly off and passengers and flight crew moving around the plane.
Ms. Homendy said investigators would compare the stopper on the second door, at the opposite end of the hallway, to the one that had burst in hopes of determining what went wrong. She added that investigators would also examine things like the plane’s pressurization system and maintenance records.
The Boeing 737 Max 9 in question is a relatively new aircraft for Alaska Airlines, having been delivered to the airline on October 31. It was certified in November, according to the FAA registration of aircraft. It entered commercial service that month and has since logged 145 flights, according to flight radar24another flight tracking site.
Forrest Gossett, a spokesman for Spirit AeroSystems, said Saturday that his company installed plugs in the doors of the Max 9s and that Spirit had installed the plug on the Alaska Air flight.
The FAA order affects about 171 aircraft. The agency said the required inspections should take four to eight hours per plane to complete.
Dave Spero, president of Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, a union that represents more than 11,000 Federal Aviation Administration workers, including safety inspectors, said Saturday that his union’s aviation safety experts would be on the ground and the NTSB would help them determine how the plug came off the plane.
“From our perspective, there is no kind of acceptable situation in which this type of thing should happen; This type of risk should not be introduced,” said Mr Spero.
As the transportation safety board continued its investigation, it asked the public for help finding the door of the plane, which they say likely went down in Portland’s Cedar Hills neighborhood, based on radar.
Boeing’s Max planes have a troubled history. After two Max 8 plane crashes killed hundreds of people within several months in 2018 and 2019, the Max was grounded around the world.
In 2018, Lion Air Flight 610, a 737 Max 8, crashed into the ocean off the coast of Indonesia, killing all 189 passengers and crew members. Less than five months later, in 2019, Ethiopian Flight 302 crashed shortly after taking off from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board.
The Max planes were grounded after the second crash. Boeing made changes to the plane, including the flight control system behind the crashes, and the FAA cleared it to fly again in late 2020. In 2021, the company agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the Department of Justice. , resolving a criminal charge that Boeing conspired to defraud the agency.
In December, Boeing urged airlines to inspect all 737 Max planes for a possible loose bolt in the rudder control system after an international airline discovered a bolt with a missing nut during routine maintenance. Alaska Airlines said at the time that it expected to complete inspections of its fleet in the first half of January.
Airplanes are widely used. Of the nearly 2.9 million flights scheduled globally in January, 4.3 percent will be flown with Max 8 aircraft, while 0.7 percent will use the Max 9.
Juan Yoon, Victoria Kim, Orlando Mayorquin, Rebeca Carballo and Cristina Chung contributed reports.
