Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 was only six minutes into its journey from Portland, Oregon, to the small city of Ontario, California. It was still climbing when disaster struck at 16,000 ft.
With a loud bang, a door ‘plug’ — a section of the fuselage that ‘plugged’ the space where an emergency exit would be — suddenly and violently blew out, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the plane.
As freezing winds whipped into the cabin of the plane, a Boeing 737 Max 9, the rapid loss of pressure was enough to blow open the cockpit door and jolt the first officer forward, knocking off her headset.
Back in the cabin, a 15-year-old boy sitting near the hole lost the shirt off his back, sucked out of the plane as his mother clung to him. Phones, earbuds and hats as well as seat headrests followed.
Terrified, the 171 passengers struggled to put on oxygen masks that had dropped down as the plane lurched unsteadily and the pilot headed back to Portland for an emergency landing.
Nicholas Hoch, 33, an architect going to meet his girlfriend, was among many passengers who had no idea what had occurred last month. ‘Something bad’s happening, something wrong is going on, it’s not right,’ he said later. ‘That’s where the fear set in, and I started getting really scared.’
Passengers in oxygen masks sit near the the hole in the fuselage of the Alaska Airlines Boeing
The section that blew out mid-air was a plug used to cover where an emergency exit would be in the plane’s factory configuration
An ‘eerie silence’ descended on the cabin, he added, as the masks prevented anyone from talking. Many, convinced they were going to die, used the plane’s wifi to send hurried farewell messages to loved ones.
Incredibly, nobody was seriously injured, but it had very nearly been a catastrophe.
If the flight had been further into the journey and at a higher altitude, the ‘pressure differential’ between the cabin and outside would have been much greater. Passengers would also have been walking around the cabin. Many would have been sucked out of the hole or failed to get back to their seats in time to breathe oxygen.
It was also lucky that the door plug didn’t hit the horizontal and vertical stabilisers on the plane’s tail, as that would have sent the 737 spinning to the ground.
As news of the incident broke, a similarly severe downward trajectory quickly hit Boeing shares, wiping more than $14 billion (£11 billion) off the firm’s stock market value.
America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the country’s entire fleet of 737-9 Max planes fitted with door plugs for immediate inspection.
But the problems for Boeing have only continued. On Monday this week, the beleaguered company suffered further embarrassment when one of its Dreamliner 787s, carrying 200 passengers and operated by Dutch airline KLM, had to turn back to Amsterdam three hours into its flight to Los Angeles after crew realised that eight of the nine lavatories had stopped working.
An Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 making a safe landing in Palm Springs
The plug was found in a residential back garden in Portland, Oregon
It’s not on the same scale as the Alaska Airlines incident, of course, but is the latest in a run of problems for Boeing. Last week, an initial report into the Alaska Airlines incident by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that the cabin panel that blew off the new Max 9 jet appeared to be missing four key bolts. Boeing boss Dave Calhoun said: ‘Whatever final conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened.’
Shockingly, Alaska and United Airlines have announced they found loose bolts on other Max 9s. The FAA said it was investigating whether the company failed to ensure that the Max 9 was safe or even manufactured according to approved designs. In a bizarre euphemism, Calhoun described the fuselage ripping open mid-flight as a ‘quality escape’.
Critics say there have been 20 instances of production quality defects with Max planes.
Aviation experts told the Mail the Alaska Airlines debacle was not unconnected to the tragedies of 2018 and 2019, when two Boeing Max 8s, an earlier version of the controversial jet, crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia, killing 344 passengers and crew. In October 2018, a Lion Air Flight plummeted into the Java Sea shortly after take-off and, five months later, an Ethiopian Airlines crashed into a field.
Both crashes were caused by a flawed automated flight-control system that, despite the pilots’ best efforts, pushed the nose of the planes down following faulty sensor readings. This sent the aircraft into fatal dives. Seven months after the second of these crashes, then Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg dispensed with his usual swagger as he led a delegation into the U.S. Senate chamber to face questions.
The faulty software had been installed to fix an issue caused by Boeing in 2011, when — desperate to see off the competition from the innovative rival Airbus A320, developed by a European consortium — it decided to save time and money by ‘refreshing’ the existing 737 rather than producing an entirely new plane. Design changes to the old 737 (which dates to the 1960s) involved altering the aerodynamics of the wings so they could carry bigger engines. This move necessitated the new flight-control system.
Families of victims of the 2018 Lion Air crash inspect belongings salvaged from the wreckage
An American family lays flowers at the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines flight near the town of Bishoflu
Meanwhile, Boeing’s assurances to airlines that its pilots would not need to be retrained on the new 737s proved devastatingly far off the mark. ‘These people were in flying coffins,’ barked Senator Richard Blumenthal at a congressional hearing following the fatal crash, as he lacerated Boeing. ‘Boeing came to my office and said the crashes were a result of pilot error. The pilots never had a chance.’
A 2020 House committee report into the incidents called them a ‘horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA’. It claimed Boeing made ‘extensive efforts to cut costs’ and refused to slow its production of 737 Max aircraft.
At enormous pain to the industry, all Max 737s across the world were grounded for 20 months during a protracted investigation. Boeing lost orders for more than 1,000 Max jets — each costing $99-$135 million (£79-£107 million).
It later emerged that the firm had ignored a string of red lights about safety, including from a senior production manager, Ed Pierson, who just four months before the first crash warned ‘exhausted’ staff could make dangerous mistakes.
‘For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane,’ he wrote in an email.
Pierson became a whistleblower against the company at the congressional hearings after his warnings to superiors at the 737 factory in Renton, Washington, fell on deaf ears.
It seems inconceivable that after enduring such public ignominy and financial damage any organisation would possibly risk it happening again. Yet industry insiders say they were far from astonished to see the 737 Max once more courting disaster.
‘This was no surprise, unfortunately,’ Pierson told business channel CNBC about the Alaska Airlines incident. ‘For those of us that have been monitoring what’s been going on for a while with the Max, it really wasn’t a surprise, sadly,’ he said.
Other whistleblowers have revealed that ‘thousands’ of quality control inspections hadn’t been carried out on planes before they left Boeing factories, he added.
According to Boeing’s critics, the company is still under too much pressure to meet soaring demand for the planes and to see off the competition from its more successful rival, Airbus, amid a global shortage of aircraft.
‘Clearly there’s a rush to produce airplanes,’ Pierson said. ‘Inside the factories there is a phrase they call “Schedule is king”. So even though the company speaks about the quality of their planes and the importance of that, what the employees are hearing on the factory floor is ‘Get your jobs done, finish your work, get done as fast as possible, move to the next plane.’ ‘
Pierson said two weeks ago: ‘I would absolutely not fly a Max airplane. I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door.’
Joe Jacobsen, a former Boeing engineer who has also worked at the FAA gave a similar warning, saying it was ‘premature’ for airlines, including Alaska, to have resumed flying the jets.
Simon Hradecky, a leading aviation disaster expert, told the Mail he wasn’t surprised by this new setback for the 737 Max as the ‘sloppiness’ of the previous Boeing management would inevitably linger in the company, he said, whatever the determination of the new brooms to ‘get things back on track’.
The Max 9 is one of four models in the series, the others being the smaller Max 7 and Max 8, and the larger Max 10. Only the 8 and 9 have yet been certified to go into service.
Boeing critics note with dismay how there have now been more than 20 instances of production quality defects with the Max.
Only a few days before the Alaska Airlines mishap, the company asked carriers to inspect their 737 Max jets for a potential loose bolt in the rudder control system after an international operator found a bolt with a missing nut during routine maintenance.
In 2021, 90 Max jets were grounded after electrical faults were found on several planes.
Boeing has also repeatedly requested ‘engineering exemptions’ for the 737 Max from the FAA, which would free it from the usual safety standards.
Last August, all existing Max planes were instructed to limit use of their engine anti-icing system after Boeing discovered that a defect meant it could break, potentially resulting in debris piercing the fuselage and hitting passengers in window seats, and damaging the wing or tail so that the plane could lose control.
Yet in December, Boeing requested its forthcoming Max 7 model be exempted from this safety measure, claiming that such a disaster was ‘extremely improbable’.
Sean Gates, chief executive of UK-based Gates Aviation, which provides legal and safety consultancy to the aviation industry, told the Mail that Boeing’s intense rivalry with Airbus for dominance in supplying single-aisle planes such as the 737 Max — the most lucrative area of the passenger plane market — meant it ‘had not had the focus it used to have on safety as the primary concern’.
He went on: ‘I don’t believe the company went into this saying, ‘OK, let’s churn out tin cans and hope they fly’ — but everybody at Boeing will be aware that it’s losing the competition with Airbus and that it needs to pump out aircraft at maximum speed. That creates an unconscious incentive to sacrifice safety for speed.’
Although 2023 was one of the safest years in civil aviation history — in which two fatal accidents occurred involving commercial jets, compared with six in 2022 — it would, in light of Boeing’s conduct, be tempting to vow never to get on a 737 Max again.
However, experts say that’s hardly feasible. Unless we want to take a chance on Russian or Chinese-built planes, there’s only the Airbus alternative. And even if Airbus could meet all the demand — which it couldn’t — the monopoly it would acquire would make flying prohibitively expensive.
We may be stuck with the Max, but perhaps it would be wise to follow the tip from one aviation pundit who this week said he would no longer be asking for a window seat. Meanwhile, the old company slogan, ‘If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going,’ rings distinctly hollow now.