The 177 passengers on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 must have been scared for their lives. Their plane had to make an emergency landing on Friday January 5, 2024, in Oregon in the United States (Northwest). Passengers reported that a window panel flew off after takeoff, the company said.
Flight 1282 took off from Portland International Airport around 5 p.m. (0100 GMT Saturday) before returning safely “after the crew reported a pressurization problem”, declared the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
Images posted on social media showed a plane window blown out, with oxygen masks hanging from the ceiling of the aircraft, as reported in this tweet from CNN :
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“The oxygen mask was right in front of me”
A passenger on the flight, Kyle Rinker, explained on American television CNN that the window had blown out just after takeoff. “It was really brutal. Barely at altitude, the front of the window just came off and I only noticed it when the oxygen masks came down”he said.
Another passenger, Vi Nguyen, told the American daily The New York Times that she had been awakened by a loud noise during the flight.
“I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was the oxygen mask right in front of me,” she explained, “and I looked to the left and the side panel was gone.” “The first thing that came to my mind was that I was going to die,” she added.
According to testimonies from passengers on the plane, no one was seated near the faulty window.
A rare incident
The National Transportation Safety Board, the FAA and Alaska Airlines each said they were investigating the incident.
“The aircraft returned to land safely at Portland International Airport with all 171 passengers and six crew members,” according to a press release from the airline.
“Although this type of incident is rare, our flight crew were trained and prepared to safely handle this situation,” adds the press release. All Boeing 737 Max 9 type aircraft have been grounded by the company since the incident, noted The Guardian .
According to the specialist site FlightAware, the Boeing 737 Max 9 took off precisely at 5:07 p.m. local time, heading towards Ontario, California before returning to the airport around twenty minutes later. The aircraft was certified in October, according to the FAA registry available online.
The manufacturer of the device, the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing, wrote on X that it was gathering more information and that a technical team was available to investigators. Two Max 8 planes crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. Following these accidents, the Max 8 and 9 planes were grounded all over the world for two years. They were returned to service only after Boeing made changes to an automated flight control system implicated in the crashes.