Nailed to the ground. This is the result of the decision of the American Federal Civil Aviation Agency (FAA), which on Saturday ordered the immediate inspection of 171 737 MAX 9 aircraft from BoeingAfter an incident that occurred on Friday during a flight near Portland, United States. The planes are suspended from flying until then.
The agency estimates that this operation required between 4 and 8 hours by plane. Before the FAA’s announcement, the American airline Alaska had already neutralized all of its 65 planes of this model.
The decision followed an incident that occurred Friday shortly after an Alaska Airlines flight took off from Portland International Airport (Northwest Oregon) around 5 p.m. local time to Ontario, California, in the greater suburbs of Los Angeles.
“It was really brutal”
According to images posted on social networks, a door opened and detached from the cabin in mid-flight. The aircraft, which was carrying 171 passengers and 6 crew members, was then at an altitude of nearly 5,000 m, according to flight data from the FlightAware website.
According to several specialists, notably the manager of the specialized site The Air Current, Jon Ostrower, it seems that it is a door that is blocked and hidden by a partition which only reveals a porthole.
After turning around, the plane returned to land at its original airport, the incident causing only a few minor injuries. “The aircraft returned to land safely at Portland International Airport with all 171 passengers and six crew members,” according to a statement from Alaska Airlines.
“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,” a passenger on the flight, Kyle Rinker, told the American channel CNN.
According to the Portland daily, The Oregonian, citing passengers, no one was in the place immediately next to the blown-off bulkhead. But the teenager who was sitting in the middle seat had his shirt torn off by the decompression, causing minor injuries, according to the daily. “The first thing that came to my mind was ‘I’m going to die,'” Vi Nguyen told New York Times.
A series of technical problems in recent years
On Saturday, Alaska Airlines indicated, on the social network , “element of concern”.
The American transportation safety agency, the NTSB, announced that it had sent a team to Portland to investigate the reasons for this malfunction.
The manufacturer of the device, the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing, said it was gathering more information and making a technical team available to investigators, according to a reaction sent to AFP.
The incident comes after the 737 MAX suffered a series of technical problems and two crashes in recent years.
These two accidents, which caused the death of 346 people in October 2018 and March 2019, resulted in the 737 MAX being kept on the ground for 20 months, before it was re-authorized to fly. The FAA had only authorized return to service after changes to the flight control system.
More recently, Boeing had to slow down deliveries due to problems with the fuselage, particularly with the aircraft’s rear bulkhead. At the end of December, Boeing had delivered a total of more than 1,370 copies of the 737 MAX and its order book currently contains more than 4,000.