The door of an Alaska Airlines plane that separated from the fuselage shortly after takeoff on Friday has been found, American aviation authorities announced, which should help to understand the cause of this very rare incident which led to grounding Boeing 737 MAX 9s and canceling dozens of flights around the world.
• Read also: Boeing 737 MAX 9 inspections increase after door takes off
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“I am happy to report that we have found the door panel,” Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the US transportation safety agency, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said at a press conference. who dispatched a team to investigate the reasons for the incident.
A teacher recovered the sign from his backyard in Portland, Oregon. “He took a photo. In the photos I can just see the outside of the door panel, the white parts. We don’t see anything else, but we’re going to go look for it and start analyzing it,” said the head of the NTSB.
Friday, around 6:30 p.m. (02:30 GMT Saturday), shortly after takeoff of an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland International Airport (Northwest Oregon), a door opened and detached from the fuselage in mid-flight, according to the NTSB.
It is a door blocked and hidden by a partition which only reveals a porthole, specified the NTSB, a configuration offered by Boeing to customers who request it. These models have “the middle door blocked,” according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) directive published on its site.
The aircraft, which was carrying 171 passengers and 6 crew members, was then at an altitude of almost 5,000 m. The plane quickly returned to Portland and the incident caused only minor injuries.
“It was really brutal. Barely at altitude, the front of the window came off,” testified a passenger on the flight, Kyle Rinker, on the American channel CNN.
According to the NTSB, no one was seated in the two seats next to the partition that flew away. But according to passengers cited by the Portland daily, The Oregonian, a teenager sitting in the row had his shirt torn off by the decompression, causing him minor injuries.
After this very rare malfunction, the FAA “required immediate inspections of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9s before they can resume flight”, which concerns 171 aircraft worldwide, she specified on X (ex -Twitter).
As a result, airlines and safety agencies around the world have grounded some Boeing 737 MAX 9s pending inspections, and dozens of flights have been canceled.
Thus, United Airlines, which has the largest fleet of 737-9s in the world, announced to AFP that it was leaving 46 aircraft on the ground, 33 having already been examined. Alaska Airlines clarified on Saturday on
The companies Aeromexico, Copa Airlines – which operates 21 of these aircraft – and Turkish Airlines – which owns 5 – have also announced that they have grounded their planes for checks.
On the other hand, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) indicated that no operator in Europe uses the 737 MAX 9 with the technical options concerned.
“We are very, very lucky that this did not end in a more tragic way,” the president of the NTSB told the press, while the American Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, spoke of an “incident terrifying” on X.
A safety meeting was called for Tuesday by the CEO of Boeing, at the manufacturer’s factory located in Washington state (northwest).
The incident is a new episode in a dark series for the 737 MAX, Boeing’s flagship plane, which has experienced a series of technical problems and two crashes in recent years: the latter left 346 dead in October 2018 and March 2019. , leading to the grounding of the 737 MAX for 20 months and the imposition of changes to the in-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, the manufacturer had delivered more than 1,370 copies of the 737 MAX and its order book exceeded 4,000 units.