Grounding of 737 Max 9 jets after panel blowout another black eye for Boeing

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Investigators say a key piece of the plane that blew off an Alaska Airlines flight has been recovered.

  A teacher near Portland Oregon found the so-called door plug in his backyard, and authorities hope it will help them figure out what went wrong. The accident that happened 16,000 feet in the air has sparked new concerns about aircraft maker Boeing.

  Our aviation correspondent, Miles O'Brien, has the latest.

• Miles O'Brien:

  Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were in Portland to try to determine what caused the fuselage blowout on the Alaska Airlines jetliner.

  It's the latest in a string of setbacks to plague Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft. Friday's incident affected a plug covering an unused exit door. Passenger video showed the gaping hole in the side of the plane. The rapid decompression caused the cockpit door to fly open. Headrests ripped off seats.

  The two seats next to the panel that blew out were unoccupied. None of the 171 passengers or six crew members were seriously hurt.

  Emma Vu was one of those passengers.

• Emma Vu, Alaska Airlines Passenger:

  I just feel the plane drop. And it wasn't like any other turbulence, just because the masks came down too. So, that's when I knew, like, oh, gosh, this is something way different. And yes, I started freaking out.

• Miles O'Brien:

  The Alaska Airlines flight took off from Portland shortly after 5:00 p.m. Friday en route to Ontario, California. The panel blew off about six minutes into the flight, as the plane was at an altitude of 16,000 feet.

  The plane returned to Portland, making an emergency landing about 13 minutes after the blowout.

  Jennifer Homendy chairs the National Transportation Safety Board.

• Jennifer Homendy, Chair, National Transportation Safety Board:

  So, it was described as chaos, very loud, between the air and everything going on around them. And it was very violent when the rapid decompression in the door was expelled out of the plane.

• Miles O'Brien:

  The Federal Aviation Administration quickly grounded Boeing 737 MAX 9 jets with the same panel to undergo safety checks, forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights.

  The NTSB said the jetliner that suffered the blowout was not being used for flights to Hawaii after a warning light that could have indicated a pressurization issue lit up on three separate flights. They acknowledged the light may be unrelated to Friday's incident.

  All this comes after problems with the 737 MAX's MCAS safety system led to deadly crashes of the planes in Indonesia and Ethiopia back in 2018 and 2019. That issue grounded the MAX jets for nearly two years.

  The airlines that fly the 737 MAX 9 are now actively inspecting those plug doors to see what might have gone wrong. The Associated Press, Geoff, is reporting that United has found some loose bolts already, so we will be watching that one very closely.

• Geoff Bennett:

  More to come on that front.

  So, Miles, we know that pilots reported pressurization warning lights on three previous flights made by the specific aircraft involved in that incident. There's no known connection between that problem and the issue with the midair blowout, at least not yet.

  How is this investigation unfolding?

• Miles O'Brien:

  Well, that's something that we will be looking at.

  And it could be completely coincidental, Geoff, or it could be very relevant. Imagine a scenario where there was some sort of slow leak, which might have given that indication of a pressurization problem in the flight deck. What's interesting is, those lights came on in some cases while the aircraft was taxing on the ground.

  And so I don't know how much credence to put into that right now. Let's pin that up on the bulletin board for now.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Meantime, the NTSB released these images of the recovered door plug. Help us understand what this door plug does and why some models of this aircraft have them and others don't.

• Miles O'Brien:

  Well, the 737 MAX 9 is a little bigger than the MAX 8, the one we talked about so much over the recent years.

  It can have upwards of 230 seats in it. Some low-cost airliners do, in fact, cram that many seats in. But if you have 189 seats or less, you don't need those exit doors, because you don't have to get as many people out in 90 seconds' time. So they plug them. And that's what happened in this case. Air Alaska was capped off at 189 people, and so those doors were capped off as well.

• Geoff Bennett:

  There's another curious, or you could call it troubling, detail here, in that the NTSB said that there was no data available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours.

  And that's the point at which recording restarts and overwrites the previous data. First of all, how could that even happen? And what could it have offered investigators if they were able to hear what was on it?

• Miles O'Brien:

  Yes, the airline industry should be a little embarrassed about all of this. That two-hour loop really kind of dates back to the days of tape, when they could only store so much on these cockpit voice recorders.

  Obviously, we're in an era where you have unlimited virtually capability to record that information. In order to stop it from recording, you have to pull a circuit breaker, and nobody bothered to do that. And so it got recorded back over.

  It's high time — the National Transportation Safety Board has been asking this — for this for years — that the amount of time that is on that loop, the amount that is captured exceed 24 hours, actually 25 hours. And the airlines have been slow to adopt this.

• Geoff Bennett:

  We know this incident happened at an elevation of 16,000 feet, roughly three miles above Oregon. How much of a factor did that have in everybody's safety? And would things have been different had this occurred at a higher elevation?

• Miles O'Brien:

  Absolutely, Geoff.

  The pressure differential between inside and outside at 16,000 feet is about two pounds per square inch. It's much greater at 36,000 feet. The amount of pressure on the door up there would be in excess of 50,000 pounds. So it would have had much more of an explosive event. And, at that altitude, the time of so-called useful consciousness for the passengers would be only 10 seconds.

  So it would have been a much more dramatic, possibly a situation where things didn't come out as well for the passengers and crew. So a silver lining here that had happened at a relatively low altitude.

• Geoff Bennett:

  This is another black eye for Boeing, which has seen a string of incidents that have resulted in tragedies, groundings, major concerns about safety.

  How are they responding to this?

• Miles O'Brien:

  Well, they have issued just a simple paper statement saying they think safety is a top priority and they're cooperating with all the investigating authorities.

  The company has announced a town hall to presumably discuss some of these issues, but there is a long string of issues here, which may on the surface say — they seem like they're not connected, but you have to look at the big picture and wonder why this happens repeatedly. So, there are clearly some questions about its commitment to detail and safety at this point.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Alaska and United Airlines, which have a number of these Boeing models in their fleet, they canceled more than 300 flights today because of the 737 MAX 9 grounding.

  How long might it take before these airlines are back with these planes in the air? Or should they even be?

• Miles O'Brien:

  Well, the inspections, I think, are fairly straightforward.

  We have already heard a little bit about what United is finding. If, in fact, it's a case of several bolts that weren't tightened properly, that should be a fairly easy thing to rectify and put these planes back in the air. I don't think there's any fundamental design flaw here. If the bolts weren't tightened, and they can be tightened properly, I think we are all safe getting on board these aircraft.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Aviation correspondent Miles O'Brien.

  Miles, thanks, as always.

• Miles O'Brien:

  You're welcome, Geoff.

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