Pinned to the ground. This is the result of the decision of the American Federal Civil Aviation Agency (FAA), which on Saturday ordered the immediate inspection of 171 Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft following an incident on Friday during a flight near Portland, USA came. Until then, the aircraft are excluded from flight operations.
The agency estimates that this process took between 4 and 8 hours by plane. Before the FAA's announcement, the American airline Alaska had already neutralized all 65 aircraft of this model.
The decision followed an incident that occurred on Friday shortly after an Alaska Airlines flight took off from Portland International Airport (Northwest Oregon) to Ontario, California, in the larger Los Angeles suburbs, at around 5:00 p.m. local time.
“It was really brutal”
Images posted on social media showed a door opening and detaching from the cabin mid-flight. The plane, which had 171 passengers and 6 crew on board, was at an altitude of almost 5,000 m at the time, according to flight data from the FlightAware website.
According to several experts, particularly the manager of the trade site The Air Current, Jon Ostrower, it appears to be a door blocked and obscured by a partition that only reveals a porthole.
After the plane turned around, it landed back at its original airport, with the incident causing only a few minor injuries. “The aircraft returned to land safely at Portland International Airport with all 171 passengers and six crew members,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement.
“It was really brutal. As soon as I got up, the front of the window just came off and I didn't notice it until the oxygen masks came down,” a passenger on the flight, Kyle Rinker, told American broadcaster CNN.
According to the Portland newspaper The Oregonian, citing passengers, no one was in the seat next to the blown-out partition. But the teenager, who was sitting in the middle seat, had his shirt torn off due to decompression, resulting in minor injuries, according to the daily. “The first thing that came to my mind was 'I'm going to die,'” Vi Nguyen told the New York Times.
A series of technical problems in recent years
On Saturday, Alaska Airlines raised concerns on social media.
The American traffic safety authority NTSB announced that it had sent a team to Portland to investigate the reasons for this disruption.
The device's manufacturer, American aircraft manufacturer Boeing, said it was gathering more information and providing a technical team to investigators, according to a response to AFP.
The incident comes after the 737 MAX suffered a series of technical problems and two crashes in recent years.
These two accidents, which killed 346 people in October 2018 and March 2019, resulted in the 737 MAX being grounded for 20 months before being cleared to fly again. The FAA only approved the return to service after making changes to the flight control system.
Most recently, Boeing had to slow deliveries due to problems with the fuselage, particularly the aircraft's rear bulkhead. At the end of December, Boeing delivered a total of more than 1,370 copies of the 737 MAX, and there are currently more than 4,000 copies in the order book.