Airlines found loose parts in door panels during inspections

By David Koenig, Claire Rush and Tom Krisher

PORTLAND, Ore. — Federal investigators say a door panel slid up before flying off an Alaska Airlines jetliner last week, and they are looking at whether four bolts that were supposed to help hold the panel in place might have been missing when the plane took off.

The comments Monday from the National Transportation Safety Board came shortly after Alaska and United Airlines reported separately that they found loose parts in the panels — or door plugs — of some other Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

“Since we began preliminary inspections on Saturday, we have found instances that appear to relate to installation issues in the door plug — for example, bolts that needed additional tightening,” Chicagobased United said.

Alaska said that as it began examining its Max 9s, “Initial reports from our technicians indicate some loose hardware was visible on some aircraft.”

The findings of investigators and the airlines are ratcheting up pressure on Boeing to address concerns that have grown since the terrifying fuselage blowout Friday night. A plug covering a spot left for an emergency door tore off the plane as it flew 16,000 feet above Oregon.

Boeing has called an online meeting for all employees Tuesday to discuss safety.

The company, which has had problems with various planes over the years, pledged to “help address any and all findings” that airlines make during their inspections of Max 9 jets. Boeing has delivered more than 200 to customers around the world, but 171 of them were grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday until the door plugs can be inspected and, if necessary, fixed.

The door plugs are inserted where emergency exit doors would be located on Max 9s with more than about 200 seats. Alaska and United have fewer seats in their Max 9s, so they replace heavy doors with the plugs.

The panels can be opened for maintenance work. The bolts prevent the mechanism from moving upward on rollers when the plane is in flight.

During Alaska Airlines flight 1282 on Friday night, roller guides at the top of one of the plugs broke — for reasons the investigators don’t fully understand yet — allowing the entire panel to swing upward and lose contact with 12 “stop pads” that keep the panel attached to the door frame on the plane, NTSB officials said at a news briefing in Portland.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said the safety board was investigating whether four bolts that help prevent the panel from sliding up on rollers were missing when the plane took off from Portland or whether they blew off “during the violent, explosive decompression event.”

The interior of the plane suffered extensive damage, but pilots were able to return to Portland and land safely. Officials say there were no serious injuries among the 171 passengers and six crew members.

The lost door panel was found Sunday near Portland in the back yard of a school teacher’s home. NTSB officials said it will be sent to the agency’s lab in Washington, D.C., for detailed study that might help pinpoint why the plug broke loose.

Alaska and United have canceled hundreds of flights since the weekend because of their grounded planes.

WASHINGTON — Hobbled by high interest rates, persistent inflation, slumping trade and a diminished China, the global economy will slow for a third consecutive year in 2024.

That is the picture sketched by the World Bank, which forecast Tuesday that the world economy will expand just 2.4 percent this year. That would be down from 2.6 percent growth in 2023, 3 percent in 2022 and a galloping 6.2 percent in 2021, which reflected the robust recovery from the pandemic recession of 2020.

Heightened global tensions, arising particularly from Israel’s war with Hamas and the conflict in Ukraine, pose the risk of even weaker growth. And World Bank officials express worry that deeply indebted poor countries cannot afford to make necessary investments to fight climate change and poverty.

“Near-term growth will remain weak, leaving many developing countries — especially the poorest — stuck in a trap: with paralyzing levels of debt and tenuous access to food for nearly one out of every three people,” Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, said in a statement.

In recent years, the international economy has proved surprisingly resilient in the face of shock after shock: the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resurgent global inflation and the burdensome interest rates that were imposed by central banks to try to bring price increases back under control. The

World Bank now says the global economy grew half a percentage point faster in 2023 than it had predicted back in June and concludes that “the risk of a global recession has receded.’’

Leading the way in 2023 was the United States, which likely registered 2.5 percent growth last year — 1.4 percentage points faster than the World Bank had expected in mid-year. The World Bank, a 189-country antipoverty agency, expects U.S. growth to decelerate to 1.6 percent this year as higher interest rates weaken borrowing and spending.

The Federal Reserve has raised U.S. interest rates 11 times since March 2022. Its strenuous efforts have helped bring U.S. inflation down from the fourdecade high it reached in mid-2022 to nearly the Fed’s 2 percent target level.

Higher rates are also taming global inflation, which the World Bank foresees sinking from 5.3 percent last year to 3.7 percent in 2024 and 3.4 percent in 2025, though still above prepandemic averages.

China’s economy, the world’s second-largest after the United States, is expected to grow 4.5 percent this year and 4.3 percent in 2025, down sharply from 5.2 percent last year. China’s economy, for decades a leading engine of global growth, has sputtered in recent years: Its overbuilt property market has imploded. Its consumers are downcast, with youth unemployment rampant. And its population is aging, sapping its capacity for growth.

Slumping growth in China is likely to hurt developing countries that supply the Chinese market with commodities, like coal-producing South Africa and copper-exporting Chile.

The World Bank expects the 20 countries that share the euro currency to eke out 0.7 percent growth this year, a modest improvement on 0.4 percent expansion last year. Japan’s economy is forecast to grow just 0.9 percent, half the pace of its 2023 expansion.