United finds loose bolts on grounded 737 Max 9 jets
‘Installation issues’ revealed in inspections
PORTLAND, Ore. — United Airlines said Monday it found loose bolts and other “installation issues” on a part of some Boeing 737 Max 9 jets that were inspected after a midflight blowout on a similar Alaska Airlines jet Friday.
The inspections are focused on plugs used to seal an area set aside for extra emergency doors that are not required on United and Alaska Max 9s. That plug is the part that blew off the Alaska plane as it reached 16,000 feet over Oregon.
“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.
The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all Max 9s operated by Alaska and United and some flown by foreign airlines after a terrifying flight on Friday night.
The Boeing jetliner that suffered an inflight blowout over Oregon was restricted from being used for flights to Hawaii after a warning light that could have indicated a pressurization problem lit up on three different flights.
Alaska Airlines decided not to let the aircraft make long flights over water so that it “could return very quickly to an airport” if the warning light reappeared, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said Sunday.
Homendy cautioned that the pressurization light might be unrelated to Friday’s incident in which a plug covering an unused exit door blew off the Boeing 737 Max 9 as it cruised about three milesover Oregon.
More details of the harrowing flight were revealed Monday.
The first six minutes of Flight 1282 from Portland to Southern California’s Ontario International Airport had been routine, with the Boeing 737 Max 9 about halfway to its cruising altitude and traveling at more than 400 miles per hour.
As the plane climbed, the cabin’s air pressure steadily increased, a normal occurrence in comparison to the rapidly thinning air outside. The plane’s four flight attendants and 171 passengers sat strapped in their seats, nearly filling its 178-passenger capacity.
Then a boom. A 2-foot-by-4-foot piece of fuselage covering the unoperational emergency exit behind the left wing blew out. The force of the cabin air being sucked outside in a deafening rush twisted the metal bracing holding the seats next to the hole and ripped off their headrests — which by fate, were two of the few unoccupied seats.
The near-vacuum also ripped open the locked cockpit door, sucked away the pilots’ one-page emergency checklist, and pulled off the co-pilot’s headset. More than a dozen other seats, some far from the hole, were damaged by the force. Some passengers had their cellphones ripped from their hands and sucked out. Passengers said one teenager had his shirt ripped off. Dust filled the cabin.
Kelly Bartlett was seated in row 23 — three rows in front of the blowout — and said the captain had just told passengers they could use their devices again when she heard a loud explosion and the cabin filled with cold air and rushing wind. At first she didn’t know what happened.
“The oxygen mask dropped immediately,” she said. “You know what happens if the oxygen mask comes down? You put it on.”
She next saw a flight attendant walking down the aisle toward the affected row, leaning forward as if facing a stiff wind. Flight attendants began moving passengers from the row where the blowout occurred. One, a teenage boy, was moved to the seat next to Bartlett. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, she said, and his skin was red. He had some cuts on his body.
“His shirt got sucked off of his body when the panel blew out because of the pressure, and it was his seatbelt that kept him in his seat and saved his life. And there he was next to me,” she said, adding that his mother was reseated elsewhere.
The pilots and flight attendants have not made public statements and their names have not been released, but in interviews with NTSB investigators they described how their training kicked in. The pilots focused on getting the plane quickly back to Portland and the flight attendants on keeping the passengers safe, and as calm as possible.
“The actions of the flight crew were really incredible,” Homendy said Sunday. She described the scene inside the cabin during those first seconds as “chaos, very loud between the air and everything going on around them and it was very violent.”
On Monday, the FAA approved guidelines for inspecting the door plugs on other Max 9 jets and repairing them, if necessary. That move could speed the return to service of the 171 planes that the FAA grounded.