A Boeing 737 Max 9 passenger plane model remained grounded in the United States on Sunday as airlines awaited instructions from the plane maker and the Federal Aviation Administration to inspect the planes and resume flight operations, two days after a harrowing flight raised concerns had about the jet.
No one was seriously injured in the incident on an Alaska Airlines flight Friday evening in which part of a Max 9 fuselage exploded in midair, 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 led to an immediate call for safety inspections of Max 9 aircraft with similar seating configurations.
Boeing and the FAA were working to draft a message to airlines – primarily Alaska and United Airlines – with detailed instructions on how to inspect the planes, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those discussions were well underway on Sunday and, as usual, the FAA has final approval on the content of the message.
Meanwhile, Alaska, United and other airlines said they had parked all of their Max 9 planes, although they said Saturday that some of them were considered safe to fly. Federal authorities have drawn attention to a door plug in the middle of the cabin that was part of the plane's body that was ripped out Friday at an altitude of 16,000 feet and is used to fill the space occupied if the plane crashed Emergency exits would have been configured with more seating.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation into the incident, has not identified a cause and is searching for the missing part of the plane. The board said it would consider a variety of possible factors, including FAA oversight, Boeing's manufacturing process and any installation or maintenance work performed on the plane.
“Everything is possible, we are going very far, nothing is excluded,” said Jennifer Homendy, the chairwoman of the board, at a press conference on Saturday evening.
The Federal Aviation Administration said Saturday that the required inspections would affect 171 Max 9 aircraft operated by U.S. airlines or on U.S. territory. The inspections should take four to eight hours per aircraft, it said. Airlines abroad, including Turkish Airlines and Copa Airlines in Panama, also parked Max 9 planes.
The FAA order contributed to hundreds of canceled flights over the weekend. Alaska, which has 65 Max 9 aircraft, said it canceled 170 flights on Sunday because of the Max 9 grounding, affecting about 25,000 customers. A “significant” number of additional cancellations are expected in the first half of the week, it said. The airline also said it is awaiting further guidance from Boeing and the FAA on inspecting the door stuffing of its Max 9 aircraft.
Travelers took to social media to complain about long waits on the phone with customer service in Alaska and inadequate compensation as they waited at the airport and faced long delays and abrupt cancellations.
United Airlines said it canceled about 270 flights it planned to operate aboard its Max 9 aircraft on Saturday and Sunday. By replacing other aircraft, a further 145 flights were possible on both days.
United has 79 Max 9 aircraft, more than any other airline. In a statement Sunday, the airline said it has parked all of those aircraft and has begun removing door panels and conducting preliminary inspections on those jets while it awaits further FAA guidance on what inspections need to be performed to complete the to let planes fly again.
“We continue to work with the FAA to clarify the inspection process and requirements for returning all Max 9 aircraft to service,” the airline said in a statement. “We are working with customers to accommodate them on other flights and in some cases have been able to avoid cancellations by switching to other aircraft types.”
Greg Feith, an aviation security expert and former NTSB investigator, said this is the type of incident where “until you really get into the investigation – you identify all the facts, conditions and circumstances of this particular event – it is not possible to do so.” to determine whether this is the case.” whether this is just a one-off problem or a systemic problem.”
Meanwhile, the spotlight will be on those who make, maintain, operate and regulate the planes.
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 and puts additional pressure on it. 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.
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.
This weekend, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun canceled a previously scheduled leadership summit for the company's vice presidents this week and instead plans to hold a company-wide live-streamed meeting on Tuesday to discuss the accident response and Boeing's commitment to ” Safety, quality, integrity and transparency,” he said in a message to employees.
“When it comes to the security of our products and services, every decision and every action is important,” he said. “And when serious accidents like this occur, it is critical for us to work transparently with our customers and regulators to understand and address the causes of the event and ensure it does not happen again. This is and must be the focus of our team now.”
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 to get off the ground due to 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.
“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 and Christine Chung contributed reporting.