A harrowing weekend flight is forcing Boeing to once again confront concerns about its planes, particularly the 737 Max, already one of the most scrutinized jets in history.
No one was seriously injured in the incident on an Alaska Airlines flight Friday evening in which part of the fuselage of a 737 Max 9 exploded in mid-air, leaving passengers exposed to howling winds. The plane landed safely, but the event, on a flight from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, startled travelers and prompted immediate safety inspections of similar planes.
Federal authorities focused on a door plug in the middle of the cabin that is used to fill the space where an emergency exit would be located if the plane were equipped with more seats.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered the inspection of 171 Max 9 planes operated by Alaska and other U.S. airlines, leading to dozens of flight cancellations on Saturday. The inspections should take four to eight hours per aircraft, it said.
“We agree and fully support the FAA’s decision to require immediate inspections of 737-9 aircraft with the same configuration as the affected aircraft,” Jessica Kowal, a Boeing spokeswoman, said Saturday.
Alaska Airlines' problems continued into Sunday, with 163 cancellations, or 21 percent of its scheduled flights, through early afternoon, according to FlightAware. Travelers took to social media to complain about continued long phone wait times for customer service and inadequate compensation as they waited at the airport and faced long delays and abrupt cancellations. According to FlightAware, United had canceled additional flights on Sunday, 243, but these only accounted for 9 percent of the airline's scheduled flights.
It's not clear whether Boeing is responsible for what happened to the Alaska Airlines plane, but the incident raises new questions for the manufacturer. Another version of the Max, a 737 Max 8, was involved in two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed hundreds of people and led to the plane being grounded worldwide.
“The problem is what's going on at Boeing,” said John Goglia, a longtime aviation safety consultant and retired member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes.
Last month, the company asked airlines to inspect the more than 1,300 Max planes it delivered for a possible loose screw in the rudder control system. Over the summer, Boeing said a key supplier improperly drilled holes in a component that helps maintain cabin pressure. Since then, Boeing has invested in that supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, and worked more closely with it to resolve production issues.
“We are seeing increased stability and quality performance in our own factories, but we are working to bring the supply chain up to the same standards,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said on a call with investor analysts and reporters in October.
Spirit AeroSystems also worked on the 737 Max 9 fuselage, including fabricating and installing the door plug that was defective on the Alaska Airlines flight.
Deliveries of another Boeing plane, the twin-aisle 787 Dreamliner, were virtually stagnant for more than a year, until the summer of 2022, while the plane maker worked with the FAA to iron out various quality issues, including razor-thin gaps in the plane's body.
Another flaw discovered last summer slowed deliveries of the aircraft again. And production of both the 737 and 787 has been slow because of these and other quality and supply chain issues.
The Max was discontinued in early 2019 after two accidents in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed a total of 346 people. Over 20 months, Boeing worked with regulators around the world to fix problems with the plane's flight control software and other components.
When passenger flights aboard the Max resumed at the end of 2020, the crisis had cost the company about $20 billion.
Since then, the plane's two medium-sized variants, the Max 8 and Max 9, have been flying. But the smallest, the Max 7, and the largest, the Max 10, have yet to be approved by regulators.
The Max is the best-selling aircraft in Boeing history. The more than 4,500 outstanding orders for the aircraft represent more than 76 percent of Boeing's backlog. The aircraft is also very popular with airlines: of the almost three million flights planned worldwide this month, around five percent will be carried out with a Max, mostly with the Max 8, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider.
Alaska Airlines has 65 Max 9 aircraft and United Airlines has 79. Both conducted inspections on Saturday.
On Sunday, Turkish Airlines announced that it would immediately ground the five Max 9 aircraft in its fleet until further notice.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board have begun investigating the case and are expected to examine a variety of factors, including Boeing's manufacturing process and the FAA's oversight of the company, as well as any work that Boeing or Alaska Airlines performed on the plane. Investigators have also identified an area where the door likely landed and asked the public for help in the search.
“This is the type of thing where until you really get into the investigation – identify all the facts, conditions and circumstances of that particular event – you determine whether it's just a one-off problem or a systemic problem,” Greg said Feith, an aviation security expert and former NTSB investigator.
Meanwhile, the spotlight will be on those who make, maintain, operate and regulate the planes.
“Every American deserves a full explanation from Boeing and the FAA about what went wrong and what steps will be taken to ensure another incident does not occur in the future,” said Senator JD Vance, Republican of Ohio, in a post on Saturday on X
Mark Walker, Christine Chung and Safak Timur contributed reporting.