The US Federal Aviation Administration has ordered an inspection of 171 737 MAX 9 aircraft belonging to US companies or operating in the US.
Admittedly, these are inspections that last a couple of hours and the airlines announce that they are already returning the planes to the air.
The reason for the checks was the new bad luck of this series of Boeing planes, the most bizarre so far, and only by sheer luck – no victims.
On Friday, an Alaska Airlines plane on a flight from Portland to Ontario lost part of its cabin. At an altitude of nearly five kilometers, part of the cabin around one window simply flew out, leaving a hole the size of a door.
The seat directly next to that window was unoccupied, but a boy sitting in the middle seat was injured by the sudden drop in pressure. There were no reports of anyone being seriously injured.
Good luck
"The circumstances were extremely fortunate for the passengers," Petar Vojinović, editor of the aviation portal Tango Six, told Vreme.
"The part of the hull structure that fell off was large enough, the separation apparently happened very slowly and, most importantly, at a lower altitude than the cruising altitude," explains Vojinović.
The plane carrying 171 passengers and six crew members turned around and landed safely at the Portland airport.
The pressure in the cabin is more or less uniform throughout the flight, and the passengers feel the change in altitude only through a slight pressure in the ears. But otherwise, when a hole opens in the hull, there can be a deadly sudden change in pressure.
"The damage would have been greater if the fall of the structure had occurred at, say, a standard cruising altitude of ten kilometers," continues Vojinović.
"The pressure difference would be more drastic and it could endanger the lives of passengers." That would be 'explosive decompression', then it damages the lungs and other organs", says our interlocutor, adding that it mostly depends on the size of the opening, including whether the passengers have already unfastened their seat belts.
New bad luck for Boeing
The incident was new trouble for Boeing and its 737 MAX series. In two accidents in 2018 and 2019, 346 people died in these planes. A poor control program was responsible for directing the planes down.
Boeing then reworked the plane and slowly regained its permits to fly. But various shortcomings continued to come to light, and Boeing's balance sheet was reduced as a result.
