Boeing 737 Max Planes Grounded After Door Plug Blows Out At 16,000 Feet

Photo: Elizabeth Le (AP)

Passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight leaving Portland, Oregon endured a harrowing ordeal when a door plug blew out the side on the flight’s Boeing 737 Max 9 just minutes after takeoff. The massive hole in the fuselage’s side at 16,000 feet caused the cabin to depressurize, the lights to flicker and oxygen masks to drop from the ceiling. Luckily, no one was sitting directly next to the plug as the back of an unoccupied seat was ripped out of the aircraft.

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Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 ended its scheduled service to Seattle, Washington and immediately made an emergency landing in Portland. All 171 passengers or six crew members made it off the aircraft without serious injury. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the force of decompression was so violent that it threw the locked cockpit door open. Several items were sucked straight out of the Boeing, including at least two phones.

Photo: NTSB (AP)

The Boeing 737 Max 9 involved was delivered to Alaska Airlines new in late October and has flown 150 times since entering service, CNN reports. The airline banned the plane from making trans-oceanic flights after pilots spotted warning lights indicating a cabin pressurization issue on a previous flight. In response to the incident, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has temporarily grounded certain Boeing 737 Max 9 airliners. The agency stated that grounding will impact 171 airplanes worldwide, that can return to the skies once they undergo immediate inspection.

Complicating the investigation, the cockpit voice recorder was recorded over, according to CBS News. The FAA requires the previous two hours of cockpit communications to be recorded and investigators were too late to pull the 737 Max 9’s voice recorder. However, the door plug was found. It landed in the yard of a Portland school teacher.