During inspections of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft, the US airline United Airlines found loose screws on the fuselage component that had broken off a few days ago during the flight of such a machine. A United spokeswoman did not say Monday how many planes had the problem. The airline has a total of 79 aircraft of this type.
United has now discovered loose screws on ten aircraft, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday. The number of affected machines could still increase. The airline Alaska Airlines also later reported that it had discovered problems with other Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft. In initial checks of a fuselage fragment that broke out of a machine of this type in flight last week, loose parts were found, Alaska announced on Tuesday night.
The industry website “The Air Current” first reported on the find. “This changes everything because it is now a fleet problem. It’s a quality control issue,” said US aviation safety expert John Cox. Investigators said on Sunday that it was still too early to determine the cause.
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The incident raises new doubts among industry experts about the production of the 737 Max. “It was really important to find out if just this one plane was affected on Friday evening,” said Anthony Brickhouse, an aviation safety expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “The fact that United has now found several aircraft with loose screws means the investigation is expanding.”
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At the weekend, the US aviation authority FAA ordered 171 aircraft worldwide to be grounded and inspected. Before the 737 Max 9 models are allowed to take off again, they must be examined carefully. This takes four to eight hours per aircraft, according to a statement from the US authority.
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The now faulty component closes a door opening that is not needed in the model variant. On an Alaska Airlines flight on Friday, the part suddenly tore off shortly after takeoff while climbing at an altitude of around five kilometers. The 171 passengers largely escaped in horror. According to experts, this is also due to fortunate circumstances: no one was sitting directly next to the part that broke out and all passengers were still wearing their seatbelts during this phase of the flight.
The pilots of the plane, which was scheduled to fly from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, initiated an emergency landing and returned to the airport after 20 minutes.
According to the local authority EASA, no aircraft in the European Union are affected by the decommissioning and inspections.
Experts say Alaska Airlines shouldn’t have let Boeing take off
Alaska Airlines is also under pressure to explain. In view of the airline’s decision to only allow the Boeing 737-9 Max to fly over land due to warnings from a cabin pressure system, experts are raising the question of whether the affected aircraft was even operational. Steven Wallace, an aviation safety consultant and former head of accident investigations for the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), demanded information about why those responsible were afraid of using the plane over the sea. “Alaska Airlines needs to answer that,” Wallace said.
Alan Diehl, a former accident investigator for both the NTSB and the FAA, criticized that the airline should not have used the plane. But he also said the decision to stop using the plane for flights to Hawaii may have prevented a disaster. If the plug had broken out halfway to Hawaii, the pilots would have been forced to fly so low that the passengers would have been able to breathe without oxygen masks – which would have burned more fuel, Diehl said.
The gaping hole in the fuselage would also have increased air resistance. The plane might have run out of fuel over the Pacific. Whoever made the decision to no longer use the machine for Hawaii flights “probably saved a lot of lives,” said Diehl.
The FAA and Alaska Airlines declined to comment on the matter.
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The affected aircraft had already been withdrawn from flights to Hawaii by Alaska Airlines before Friday’s incident because a warning light on three previous flights indicated a possible problem with cabin pressure, NTSB Chairman Jennifer Homendy said on Sunday. The warning light may have nothing to do with Friday’s incident. Alaska Airlines has banned the plane from long flights over water so that it can quickly return to an airport in an emergency if the warning light signals a problem again.
Other aviation insiders described the airline’s decision to allow the plane to take off anyway after pressure warnings on flights on December 7, January 3 and January 4 – the day before the incident – as not unusual. “Regardless of what maintenance they did, they decided to be conservative and not leave the thing afloat,” said John Cox, a former airline pilot and current safety consultant. The sporadic pressure warnings – they occurred on three of 145 flights – could have indicated a defective sensor.
It is not the first time that the Max variant has caused major problems for Boeing: After two crashes in 2018/2019 with a total of 346 deaths, the Max variant of Boeing’s best-selling aircraft series was banned from flying worldwide from March 2019 to November 2020. Boeing slipped into its worst crisis and has been in the red continuously since 2019. There are also problems in the armaments sector.
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