The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Saturday ordered US airline operators to temporarily ground some Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft for inspections.
The order came after an Alaska Airlines flight had to make an emergency landing when a window and piece of fuselage blew out in midair on Friday.
The hole in the aircraft was ripped open some 20 minutes after take off, causing the cabin to depressurize.
The FAA said it was requiring immediate inspections of Max 9 planes operated by US airlines or flown in the country by foreign carrier affecting about 171 planes worldwide.
Side panel blows out mid-flight on Alaska Airline Alaska Airlines grounded its whole fleet of Boeing 737 Max 9 after Friday’s incident, but had returned some of its grounded planes to service
The hole in the aircraft was ripped open some 20 minutes after take off, causing the cabin to depressurize.
Oxygen masks were released and the plane safely landed soon after, with over 170 passengers and six crew members unharmed.
“Following tonight’s event on Flight 1282, we have decided to take the precautionary step of temporarily grounding our fleet of 65 Boeing 737-9 aircraft,” Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci said in a statement.
Difficult start in the skies for the latest 737s The Boeing 737-9 MAX just received its certification last October, FFA online records show. It has been on 145 flights since going into commercial service on Nov 11.
Boeing said it was gathering more information and had a technical team ready to support the investigation. Alaska Airlines’ Minicucci said the carrier was “working with Boeing and regulators to understand what occurred.”
The twin-engine, single-aisle Max is the newest version of most-flown commercial series of aircraft in the world, Boeing 737s. In service since May 2017, it’s frequently used on US domestic flights.
Two Max 8 aircrafts crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people and prompting a worldwide grounding of all Max 8 and Max 9 planes that lasted nearly two years.
In 2018, a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max plane in Indonesia crashed, killing 189 people. A year later, the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max crashed soon after take off from Addis Ababa, killing 157 people.
Grounded Boeing 737 MAX set to fly againTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
rmt/lo (AFP, AP)
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