A warning light had come on three times before Alaska Airlines flight 1282 lost a piece of its fuselage in the air. That is what National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters on Sunday, two days after the Boeing 737 Max 9 turned back to Portland International Airport with a hole in its side.
The light came on during flights on Dec. 7, Jan. 3 and Jan. 4. Homendy said she lacked full details on the December event. On Jan. 3 it lit during a flight, and on Jan. 4 it lit after the plane had already landed. The light may point to a pressurization fault, so Alaska had barred the jet from long flights over water. The idea was that a plane with a recurring warning should be able to get back to an airport fast.
Homendy cautioned that the light could have nothing to do with Friday’s failure.
Minutes after takeoff
On Friday, a plug covering an unused exit door blew off the aircraft about 16,000 feet up. The flight had left Portland for Ontario, California, only minutes earlier. The pilots turned around and landed safely.
Homendy said the timing was lucky. Had the plane reached a cruising altitude of at least 30,000 feet, passengers and flight attendants might have been up and moving in the cabin. The two seats beside the missing plug were empty. Nobody among the 171 passengers, two pilots and four flight attendants was seriously hurt.
The rapid decompression still did damage. Several rows of seats were wrecked and insulation was torn from the walls. The cockpit door flew open and slammed into a lavatory door. The co-pilot’s headset was pulled off, the captain lost part of hers, and a reference checklist within the pilots’ reach was sucked out of the cockpit.
A plug in a backyard
A school teacher found the missing plug on Sunday in his backyard near Portland, the NTSB said. Investigators plan to examine it to work out how it separated from the jet. Two cell phones that looked like passengers’ were also picked up, one in a yard and one beside a road. The NTSB took both and said it would give them back.
One tool will be missing from the inquiry. Homendy said the cockpit voice recorder overwrote the flight’s audio after two hours, so investigators cannot listen to what was said in the cockpit.
The aircraft and the fleet
Boeing delivered this plane in October. FAA records show it came off the assembly line and was certified two months before the incident, and FlightRadar24 data shows it began commercial service on Nov. 11. It had flown 145 flights since then, and the Portland departure was its third of the day.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered 171 of the 218 Max 9 planes in operation grounded until they are inspected. Alaska and United are the only U.S. carriers flying the model, and between them they scrapped more than 600 flights.
The Max entered service in 2017. Two Max 8 crashes, in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, killed 346 people in total, and every Max 8 and Max 9 stayed grounded worldwide for nearly two years while Boeing changed an automated flight control system tied to those crashes. Other problems have followed, including manufacturing flaws, overheating concerns and a possible loose bolt in the rudder system.
