Alaska Airlines flight at a different altitude could have been ‘catastrophic’

Several Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 passengers were hurt when a side of the Boeing 737 MAX 9 burst midflight last week — but injuries could have been much worse had circumstances been slightly different, according to local aviation medicine experts.

The aircraft was about 20 minutes into the flight, headed to Southern California, and had climbed about 16,000 feet when a door plug blew out and left a wide hole in the plane. If the MAX 9 had been at cruising altitude — around 30,000 to 40,000 feet — injuries might have been “catastrophic,” said Dr. William Bensinger, a Seattle aviation medical examiner who’s spent more than 40 years treating and evaluating pilots.

“The most concerning to me would be if someone was sitting in the seat next to the blowout,” Bensinger said. “Rapid decompression like that would cause air to rush out of the cabin, and if someone were sitting in that chair with their seatbelt off, they would get sucked out of the airplane. ... It would have happened so fast you couldn’t react.”

On Flight 1282, no one was in the seat directly next to the blowout, but a 15-year-old was sitting in the window seat directly ahead of the hole as the air rushed out of the passenger cabin.

His mother, sitting in the middle seat next to him, described to The Seattle Times seeing her son’s seat twisting backward toward the hole, his seat headrest ripped off and sucked into the void and her son’s arms jerked upward.

“It’s basically like a giant vacuum outside the airplane,” said Dr. Keith Lemmon, who retired as a Colonel in the U.S. Army in 2019 and founded Northwest Aviation Medicine in Gig Harbor.

She held on to her son tightly, hooking her arms beneath his arms and wrapped around his back. It wasn’t until after the flight, she said, that she noticed his clothing had been torn off his upper body.

The 10,000- to 20,000foot difference in altitude means a significant difference in air pressure and available oxygen levels, according to Bensinger. At 16,000 feet, air pressure is “about

90% lower” than what people are used to at sea level, and passengers have about half the level of oxygen they’d normally have, he said. At 30,000 feet, even less oxygen is available in the air — and temperatures are much colder.

Cabins are generally pressurized between 4,000 and 8,000 feet, but if the door had blown out while the plane was at cruise level, people aboard would likely have had less than a minute before losing consciousness, Bensinger said.

On the Alaska flight, a woman put on her own mask before she, with great difficulty, managed to put a mask on to the mom and son. The woman, a stranger to the two, then grabbed onto the mother as she kept a tight grip on her teen.

“It was definitely lucky it happened at a midrange altitude, rather than at a typical cruise altitude,” Lemmon said. “When the oxygen level decreases rapidly like that, you have to get the emergency oxygen masks on quickly or you could become hypoxic.”