(Headline USA) The Boeing jetliner that suffered an inflight blowout over Oregon was not being used for flights to Hawaii after a warning light that could have indicated a pressurization problem lit up on three different flights, a federal official said Sunday.
Alaska Airlines flight 1282 took off from Portland at 5:07 p.m. Friday for a two-hour trip to Ontario, California. About six minutes later, the chunk of fuselage blew out as the plane was climbing at about 16,000 feet.
One of the pilots declared an emergency and asked for clearance to descend to 10,000 feet, where the air would be rich enough for passengers to breathe without oxygen masks.
Videos posted online by passengers showed a gaping hole where the paneled-over door had been. They applauded when the plane landed safely about 13 minutes after the blowout. Firefighters came down the aisle, asking passengers to remain in their seats as they treated the injured.
It was extremely lucky that the airplane had not yet reached cruising altitude, when passengers and flight attendants might be walking around the cabin, said National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy.
At a news conference Sunday night, Homendy provided new details about the chaotic scene that unfolded on the plane.
The explosive rush of air damaged several rows of seats and pulled insulation from the walls. The cockpit door flew open and banged into a lavatory door.
The force ripped the headset off the co-pilot and the captain lost part of her headset. A quick reference checklist kept within easy reach of the pilots flew out of the open cockpit, Homendy said.
The plane made it back to Portland, however, and none of the 171 passengers and six crew members was seriously injured. Homendy said the two seats next to the part that tore off were unoccupied.
Alaska Airlines had previously decided to restrict the aircraft from long flights over water so the plane “could return very quickly to an airport” if the warning light reappeared, Homendy said.
She cautioned that the pressurization light might be unrelated to Friday’s incident in which a plug covering an unused exit door blew off the Boeing 737 Max 9 as it cruised about three miles over Oregon.
The warning light came on during three previous flights: on Dec. 7, Jan. 3 and Jan. 4—the day before the door plug broke off.
Homendy said she didn’t have all the details regarding the Dec. 7 incident but specified the light came on during a flight on Jan. 3 and on Jan. 4 after the plane had landed.
MISSING DOOR PLUG DISCOVERED
The NTSB said the lost door plug was found Sunday near Portland, Oregon, by a school teacher—for now, known only as Bob—who discovered it in his backyard and sent two photos to the safety board.
Investigators will examine the plug, which is 26 by 48 inches and weighs 63 pounds , for signs of how it broke free.
Investigators will not have the benefit of hearing what was going on in the cockpit during the flight. The cockpit voice recorder—one of two so-called black boxes—recorded over the flight’s sounds after two hours, Homendy said.
Before the discovery of the missing plug, the NTSB had pleaded with residents in an area west of Portland called Cedar Hills to be on the lookout for the object.
On Sunday, people scoured dense thickets wedged between busy roads and a light rail train station. Adam Pirkle said he rode 14 miles through the overgrowth on his bicycle.
“I’ve been looking at the flight track, I was looking at the winds,” he said. “I’ve been trying to focus on wooded areas.”
Searchers located two cell phones that appeared to have belonged to passengers on Friday’s terrifying flight. One was discovered in a yard, the other on the side of a road. Both were turned over to the NTSB, which vowed to return them to their owners.
FLIGHTS GROUNDED
Hours after the incident, the FAA ordered the grounding of 171 of the 218 Max 9s in operation, including all those used by Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, until they can be inspected. The airlines were still waiting Sunday for details about how to do the inspections.
Alaska Airlines, which has 65 Max 9s, and United, with 79, are the only U.S. airlines to fly that particular model of Boeing’s workhorse 737. The companies operate nearly two-thirds of the 215 Max 9 aircraft in service around the world, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
Alaska Airlines has grounded its entire fleet of 65 Max 9s for inspections and maintenance. The airline initially kept 18 of its Max 9s in service Saturday because they had received in-depth inspections as part of recent maintenance checks. But the airline pulled those jets from service Saturday night to comply with an FAA directive for all operators of Max 9s to conduct specific inspections.
Alaska Airlines said it had canceled 170 Sunday flights, affecting 25,000 passengers, and expects cancelations to continue through the first half of the week. Early Monday, 20% of the carrier’s flights were cancelled, 139 in all, according to the flight tracking site FlightAware.
Passengers whose flights are canceled will be moved the next available flight, the airline said, or they can request a change or a refund without incurring fees under a flexible travel policy.
United Airlines, the world’s biggest operator of Max 9s, grounded its entire fleet of 79 Max 9s and is seeking to “clarify the inspection process and requirements for returning” them to service. The airline had cancelled 204 flights early Monday, or 7% of all planned departures, according to FlightAware.
United said it was waiting for Boeing to issue a “multi-operator message,” which is a service bulletin used when multiple airlines need to perform similar work on a particular type of plane.
Boeing was working on the bulletin but had not yet submitted it to the FAA for review and approval, according to a person familiar with the situation. Producing a detailed, technical bulletin frequently takes a couple days, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a matter that the company and regulators have not publicly discussed.
Six other airlines use the Max 9: Panama’s Copa Airlines, Aeromexico, Turkish airlines, Icelandair, flydubai, and SCAT Airlines in Kazakhstan, according to Cirium. Copa Airlines said it had temporarily suspended 21 Boeing 737 Max 9s to comply with the FAA’s order.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, chair of the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said she agreed with the decision to ground the Max 9s.
“Aviation production has to meet a gold standard, including quality control inspections and strong FAA oversight,” she said in a statement.
It remained unclear why Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had yet to publicly comment on the matter as of Monday, but would not be the first time that the former South Bend mayor and train enthusiast, considered to have been a diversity hire due to his LGBT identity, has been absent on the job.
Buttigieg’s latest disappearing act comes as a scandal continued to plague the White House following news that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had spent several days in the hospital while apparently lying to the White House and withholding the details of his medical emergency.
PLANE SAFETY CONCERNS
Federal officials and airline executives regularly tout the safety of air travel.
There has not been a fatal crash of a U.S. airliner since 2009, when a Colgan Air plane operated for Continental crashed near Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 people on board and one on the ground. However, a surge in close calls between planes at U.S. airports in the past year prompted the FAA to convene a “safety summit” last year, in which officials encouraged airlines and pilots to redouble their attention to careful flying.
The incident has also renewed questions about the safety of Boeing’s Max aircraft, which the newest version of the company’s storied 737. There are two versions of the aircraft in service: the Max 8 and the Max 9, which is the larger of the two.
Regulators around the world grounded Max 8 planes for nearly two years after a Lion Air flight crashed in Indonesia in 2018, and an Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 crashed in 2019. Boeing changed an automated flight control system implicated in the crashes.
The aircraft involved rolled off the assembly line and received its certification two months ago, according to online FAA records. It had been on 145 flights since entering commercial service Nov. 11, said FlightRadar24, another tracking service. The flight from Portland was the aircraft’s third of the day.
The Max is the newest version of Boeing’s venerable 737, a twin-engine, single-aisle plane frequently used on U.S. domestic flights. The plane went into service in May 2017.
Two Max 8 jets crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. All Max 8 and Max 9 planes were grounded worldwide for nearly two years until Boeing made changes to an automated flight control system implicated in the crashes.
The Max has been plagued by other issues, including manufacturing flaws.
Last year, the FAA told pilots to limit use of an anti-ice system on the Max in dry conditions because of concern that inlets around the engines could overheat and break away, possibly striking the plane. And in December, Boeing told airlines to inspect the planes for a possible loose bolt in the rudder-control system.
However, those past issues are unrelated to Friday’s blowout, which is an exceedingly rare event in air travel.
Anthony Brickhouse, a professor of aerospace safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said it’s too soon to say whether the blowout involved an issue with Max 9s or that specific flight. Brickhouse said passengers should feel confident that regulators and airlines will make sure the grounded Max 9s are safe before returning them to service.
Brickhouse said it it was lucky that the emergency occurred shortly after takeoff when passengers were all seated with their seatbelts on. But he said that doesn’t mean passengers should feel scared to leave their seats once the pilot turns off the “fasten seatbelt” sign because it’s so unlikely for holes to open in the fuselages of airliners.
There have, however, been rare instances of holes opening in the fuselages of airliners. In most cases, they have been the result of metal fatigue in the plane’s aluminum skin.
In the most horrific case, a flight attendant for Aloha Airlines was blown out of the cabin of a Boeing 737 over the Pacific Ocean in 1988 after an 18-foot-long chunk of the roof peeled away. Her body was never found.
The tragedy led to tougher rules for airlines to inspect and repair microscopic fuselage cracks before they tear open in flight.
In 2009, a hole opened in the roof of a Southwest Boeing 737 flying 35,000 feet over West Virginia. And in 2011, a 5-foot gash unfurled in another Southwest Boeing 737, forcing pilots to make an emergency landing at a military base in Arizona. No one was injured in either of those cases, both of which were blamed on metal fatigue.
In 2018, a passenger on a Southwest Airlines jet was killed in when a piece of engine housing blew off and shattered the window she was sitting next to. That incident involved an earlier version of the Boeing 737, not a Max.
“When passengers board a flight they should feel confident that the aircraft they are flying on is safe,” Brickhouse said.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
