by ETHE National Transportation Safety Board On Tuesday will be aimed at preventing another frightening event, such as that with a panel that fired a Boeing 737 Max Midair in January 2024.
The board will discuss what NTSB researchers have discovered in the past 17 months, including their revelation that bolts that protect the so-called door plug panel have been removed and have never been replaced during a repair. Board members were also expected to approve recommendations to make something similar happen again.
The eruption on board Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 took place minutes after the last January left from Portland, Oregon, and created a roaring air vacuum that sucked objects from the cabin and spread them on the ground under the ground, along with rubble from the hull. Seven passengers and one flight present were given minor injuries, but nobody was killed. Pilots were able to safely land the plane back at the airport.
Oxygen masks fell and the telephones started flying
The accident occurred when the plane flew at 16,000 feet (4,800 meters). Oxygen masks fell during the fast decompression and a few mobile phones and other objects were swept through the hole in the plane while 171 passengers fought with wind and roaring noise.
The first six minutes of the flight to Ontario International Airport in South California were routine. The Boeing 737 Max 9 was about halfway through its cruise height and traveled with more than 400 mph (640 km / h) when passengers described a loud “tree” and wind so strongly that it tore the shirt of someone’s back.
“We knew something was wrong,” Kelly Bartlett told the Associated Press in the days after the flight. “We didn’t know what. We didn’t know how serious. We didn’t know if it meant we would crash.”
The 2-foot-by-4 foot (61-centimeter-for-122-centimeter) piece of trunk coverings that covered a unoperational emergency exit behind the left wing was blown away. Only seven seats on the flight were not occupied, including the two seats closest to the opening.
Missing bolts focus on the production of Boeing
The panel that was blew away and installed by a supplier, Spirit Aerosystems. It was removed in a Boeing factory so that employees could repair damaged rivets, but bolts that help protect the door plug were not replaced. It is not clear who removed the panel.
The NTSB said in a provisional report that four bolts were not replaced after a repair work in a Boeing factory, but the company said that the work was not documented.
Boeing Factory Workers told NTSB researchers that they are putting pressure on working too quickly and were asked to perform jobs that they were not qualified for, including opening and closing the door plug on the aircraft involved.
A Boeing by installation program said he was never told to take shortcuts, but everyone was confronted with pressure to keep the assembly line moving.
“That is how mistakes are made. People try to work too quickly,” he told the researchers. The installation program and other employees were not mentioned in documents about the probe.
Problems with the Boeing 737 Max
The maximum version of the best -selling 737 plane van Boeing is the source of persistent problems for the company since two of the Jets crashed, one in Indonesia in 2018 and another in Ethiopia in 2019, in which a combined 346 people were killed.
Researchers determined that those crashes were caused by a system that was dependent on a sensor that resulted in defective measurements to push the nose down, so that pilots were unable to get control back. After the second crash, Max Jets were well -founded worldwide until the company redesigned the system.
Last month, the Ministry of Justice concluded a deal that could prevent Boeing criminal prosecution due to alleged misleading American regulators about the Max for the two crashes.
But supervisors of the Federal Aviation Administration have closed Boeing’s 737 MAX production by 38 jets per month, while researchers ensure that the company has strengthened its safety practices.
Boeing hired a new CEO last year, Kelly Ortberg, and created a new function for a senior vice president of quality to help improve production.
The company was back in the news earlier this month when a 787 crashed by Air India shortly after taking off and killed at least 270 people. Researchers have not determined what that crash has caused, but so far they have not found any mistakes with the model that has a strong safety record.
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Associated Press writer Claire Rush has contributed to this report from Portland, Oregon.
