The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a temporary grounding of about 171 Boeing Max 9 airplanes after an incident on an Alaska Airlines airplane.
“The FAA will order the temporary grounding of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory,” the federal agency said on Saturday in a statement. “The Emergency Airworthiness Directive (EAD) that will be issued shortly will require operators to inspect aircraft before further flight that do not meet the inspection cycles specified in the EAD. The required inspections will take around four to eight hours per aircraft.”
The FAA estimated that around 171 airplanes will be affected worldwide by this order.
The civil aviation authority issued the order after an incident happened on an Alaska Airlines flight.
An Alaska Airlines flight en route from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, made an emergency landing on Friday night following a mid-air incident where a portion of the aircraft blew out.
Social media footage shows a window and a portion of a side wall panel missing on the airplane and oxygen masks deployed.
Images of the aircraft shared by passengers onboard seem to indicate that, during the flight, the rear mid-cabin exit door became detached from the aircraft, reported Flightradar24 on its website.
Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, a Boeing 737 MAX 9, departed from Portland International Airport at 4:52 p.m. PST, according to FlightAware.
The incident occurred approximately six minutes into the flight when the aircraft reached an altitude of around 16,000 feet.
The jet, carrying 171 passengers and six crew members, safely returned to Portland International Airport and landed at approximately 5:30 p.m, the airline confirmed.
The pilot declared an emergency, notifying air traffic control of a depressurization issue, stating, “We’re declaring an emergency. We do need to come down to 10,000.”
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed that a “pressurization issue” occurred.
Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.
Alaska Airlines released a statement, saying, “The safety of our guests and employees is always our primary priority, so while this type of occurrence is rare, our flight crew was trained and prepared to safely manage the situation.”
The airline is actively investigating the incident and has pledged to share more information as it becomes available.
The new Boeing 737 MAX 9 was delivered in late October to Alaska Airlines and certified in early November, according to FAA data.
Boeing said in a statement that it was looking into the emergency landing.
“We are aware of the incident involving Alaska Airlines Flight 1282,“ the company said in a statement. ”We are working to gather more information and are in contact with our airline customer. A Boeing technical team stands ready to support the investigation.”
Boeing has faced previous issues with its 737 MAX 8 model, leading to its grounding worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020. The groundings followed two fatal crashes involving the model: Lion Air Flight 610 on Oct. 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019, resulting in a combined total of 346 fatalities.
In April, a manufacturing issue was discovered in the 737 MAX 8 model related to the installation of fittings in the rear fuselage. Boeing insisted it was not an immediate safety concern, and the FAA validated that conclusion, allowing affected planes to continue flying while inspections were conducted.
I would “investigate” the passengers sitting in the 2 exist rows on that side of the aircraft as it could be that one of the passengers could have activated the exist door in mid-fight — It seems like the most logical explanation to me. It wasn’t a ragged tearing of the skin of the aircraft as one might expect from a structural failure and decompression!
Having worked on various aircraft including the Boeing 737, I can attest that you can’t open any of these exit doors when the cabin is pressurized as it would be in flight. The doors are made to open inward so there is no chance of one blowing open. The cabin pressure is around 3 psi, which doesn’t seem like much, but if you figure the door size in square inches, any exit door would have more pressure than any human could overcome.
But wasn’t it a “panel of wall” that blew off—not the door?
If they can tell us initially that a Chinese spy balloon is a weather balloon, then they could also tell us a terrorist trial run is boeing’s issue. IMHO
UPDATE (NBC news website):
“ at the end of the first full two of the NTSB investigation into the accident on board Alaska Airlines flight 1282, the agencies chair indicated that some factors were complicating the probe; plane’s cockpit voice recorder‘s record of the event was inadvertently taped over, and, at the time, the door plug had not been found.“
Yeah, I’m still thinking terrorism is in the realm of possibility. IMHO
So … Boeing insisted it was not an immediate emergency ?? Hahahaha.
It is a safety issue, no matter what. And wasn’t it 3 plane crashes.
Lion Airlines
Ethiopian Airlines and
Asia Airlines plane,
in the Boeing 737 MAX 8 air craft.
I fly fairly frequently and thankfully I have never flown on one of these aircraft, nor am I in a hurry to do so. This is not the first issue with these models, so maybe they need more inspection time or maybe a more frequent inspection schedule.
I think it’s more of a manufacturer issue that has to be investigated.