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On Saturday the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US federal agency that deals with aviation safety and controls, ordered all American airlines not to use their Boeing 737 Max 9 planes until they are inspected . The decision is due to the accident on January 5 in which an Alaska Airlines plane of this model lost a piece of the passenger cabin while in flight at 4,876 meters above sea level, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) also adopted the FAA’s decision, as did the UK Civil Aviation Authority.
It’s not yet known what caused the Alaska Airlines N704AL problem, but the FAA has asked airlines to check doors similar to the one that came off the plane. To be precise, it wasn’t a real hatch: some Boeing 737 Max 9s are set up to have fewer seats than the maximum allowed, and therefore don’t need all the emergency exits provided by the basic design of the model; in these cases the openings provided for excess emergency exits are closed with panels that act as “plugs”, rather than with doors. It is one of these “plugs” that came off the N704AL, which had two of them, located between the tail of the plane and the emergency exits on the wings.
The Boeing had taken off from Portland, Oregon, and was headed to Ontario, California. The accident occurred shortly after takeoff, although already at a high altitude, so the plane returned to Portland airport after about 20 minutes of flight. None of the people on board were significantly injured, also because there was no one sitting in the two seats closest to the piece that broke off. Jennifer Homendy, president of the National Safety Transportation Board, the US body that investigates plane crashes, he said that the consequences could have been much worse if the accident had occurred at the cruising height of the planes, when many passengers have their seat belts unfastened and some of the crew are standing in the cabin aisles.
The people involved in the accident investigation they are looking to find the piece of the plane that broke off and is believed to have crashed in the Cedar Hills area, west of downtown Portland. Homendy asked for the help of local residents in locating him. Once found, it will be analyzed and compared with the other panel, the one that did not come off, to understand what went wrong. But the plane’s pressurization system will also be examined and the maintenance operations it has undergone will be verified. It’s still a fairly new plane: it had only been in service since last November and has flown 145 times since then.
The FAA order covers 171 planes, and the agency says each inspection will take four to eight hours.
The Boeing 737 Max is the aircraft model that between March 2019 and the end of 2020 was stopped all over the world after two plane crashes in which 346 people died: that of Lion Air Flight 610 which crashed in Indonesia on 28 October 2018 and that of the Ethiopian Airlines 302 which crashed in Ethiopia on 10 March 2019. The two accidents involved the Max 8 model, a version very similar to the Max 9 (which in fact had also been stopped on that occasion). The accidents, it had been reconstructed, were due to the malfunction of a sensor connected to a software known as Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which made both planes ungovernable a few minutes after take-off, causing them to crash without the pilots being able to prevent it.
Airlines had resumed using planes of the same model only after they had undergone various modifications. In the world there are approximately 1,300 737 Max – taking into account all versions – supplied to airlines.
As for the Max 9 there are about 215 of them: 79 are used by the US company United Airlines, which has the most; Alaska Airlines has 65. Other airlines that use them include Copa Airlines, Aeromexico, Turkish Airlines, FlyDubai and Iceland Air. EASA has made it known that currently no airline in the European Union member countries uses Max 9s with the same set-up as the Alaska Airlines flight. Copa Airlines, which is a Panamanian airline, said it had temporarily suspended flights of its 21 model planes, warning of possible delays and resulting flight cancellations.