The pilots of the plane whose door plug blew out earlier this year couldn't communicate with flight attendants, had trouble communicating with air traffic control due to noise, and saw their eye protection fog up from use of oxygen masks. Those details and others, showing the chaotic aftermath of the Jan. 5 incident on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, are revealed in documents released Tuesday by the National Transportation Safety Board. They describe noise so loud that flight attendants, strapped into jump seats in the galley, could not make contact with the flight deck, ABC News reports. That was "the scariest thing," one flight attendant told investigators. "At first I didn't know if the decompression was in the front, if we have pilots."
Another flight attendant said he felt sure people had been sucked out of the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane when he finally saw two empty seats next to the door. He said it was so rare for people not to move into an empty window seat on what was otherwise a full flight. Luckily, no one was seriously injured, though a teenager lost his shirt and was badly bruised, per ABC. The pilots didn't realize there was a hole in the plane until after landing. "I knew ... there was air being brought into the airplane where there shouldn't be ... but I had no idea [of the cause]," one pilot told investigators. "I never heard anything from the flight attendants."
The documents were released amid a two-day investigative hearing on the incident. A preliminary report found four bolts designed to hold the door plug in place were missing. They had to be removed before Spirit AeroSystems employees could replace damaged rivets on the edge frame, as they did at Boeing's factory in Renton, Washington, on Sept. 19, 2023. No record of this work has been found. Around that time, "we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear," a team leader told investigators, per the Washington Post. Boeing executive Elizabeth Lund said Tuesday that 737 Max planes would be retrofitted with a door plug that can't be closed if there are problems with it. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy noted Boeing still has "a lot of work" to do to improve its safety culture. (More Boeing stories.)
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