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Investigators looking into the recent incident involving an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 have said that design flaws are not currently suspected as the reason why a door panel blew out of the plane shortly after take-off.
On Friday evening, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded some 737 MAX 9s with a configuration similar to that of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, which suffered a mid-flight blowout of a plug filling an unused emergency exit, causing rapid decompression of the aircraft.
Luckily no one was injured in the incident, but it has again brought regulatory scrutiny to an aircraft that has previously been involved in two fatal crashes leading to 346 deaths.
Speaking at a news conference, Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said: “Do we suspect that there is an overall design problem with this plane based on previous accidents involving Boeing Max? At this time, no.”
The investigators are currently assessing the doors and hinges, as well as the pressurisation system on the aircraft, in order to determine the probable cause of the blowout. The piece of fuselage that was lost was only found late yesterday in Oregon, but it could help to offer more clues.
The gaping hole that formed in the side of the Alaska Airlines jet opened up where aircraft maker Boeing fits a ‘plug’ to cover an emergency exit that the airline does not use.
Carriers such as Indonesia’s Lion Air and Corendon Dutch Airlines have more than 200 seats into their MAX 9s, which requires them to have additional emergency exits. But Alaska Airlines and United Airlines configure aircraft to have fewer than 180 seats, which negates the need to install the two mid-cabin exits under US evacuation rules.
The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority said that while it is aware of the incident, there are no UK-registered 737 MAX 9 aircraft so the impact on UK-operated aircraft and consumers is minimal.
The aircraft were originally grounded for nearly six months in 2019 while waiting for Boeing to fix a software bug that was described as a common link in the two fatal crashes. The company was able to complete an update to the software, known as manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system (MCAS), which would stop erroneous data from triggering an anti-stall system that automatically turned down the noses of the two planes that crashed.
