Inspections on Grounded Boeing Max 9s Reveal Several 'Issues' With United Airlines Planes

On Friday, an Alaska Airlines flight, en route from Oregon to California, was forced to make an emergency landing after its emergency door was blown off. Due to sheer luck, no one died during the incident, although one flight attendant suffered minor injuries from the incident. Several passengers required medical attention for their injuries.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced on Monday that inspections were underway on grounded Boeing planes in response to the shocking incident in which a panel on an Alaska Airlines flight broke off mid-flight.

The federal agency has stated that inspections could take four to eight hours per plane. Latest reports have revealed that during the recent inspections, United Airlines uncovered loose bolts on at least five of the airline's Boeing Max 9 planes.

A joint Monday statement issued by Stan Deal, the CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, and Mike Delaney, chief aerospace safety officer at Boeing, to employees relayed that the "the safety of our airplanes and everyone who steps onboard is a core Boeing value."

“We agree with and fully support the FAA’s decision to require immediate inspections of 737-9 MAX airplanes with the same configuration as the affected airplane.”

In response to the Alaska Airlines development, Boeing's stock shares on Monday dropped as much as 9%, with the subsequent grounding of dozens of Boeing 737 Max 9 planes further startling investors.

Figures managed to recover somewhat after the company issued inspection instructions for their 737 Max 9 planes to airlines. Large scale groundings such as these are rare, but are not unheard of for Boeing since two fatal crashes involving the manufacturer's 737 MAX 8 planes in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people.

However, further complicating the case is investigators' recent finding that revealed the cockpit voice recorder - the black box - from the Alaska Airlines flight was erased.

The audio could have been used to figure out what happened when a door plug blew off the airplane after it reached an altitude of 16,000 feet, but it is now lost as no one pulled the circuit breaker on the cockpit voice recorder to preserve the audio, said Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. Instead, the black box holds just its most recent two hours of recording.

“The cockpit voice recorder was completely overwritten. There was nothing on the cockpit voice recorder,” Homendy said.

The official further noted about 10 other recent incidents in which other voice recorders had been overwritten. She has called on the FAA and Congress to implement a rule that would require both new and existing planes to store audio for 25 hours—a system which is already being practiced in Europe.

In addition to that grim discovery, the missing door plug that had detached from the plane was found in a yard by a Portland, Oregon, teacher. Homendy said she and her team would retrieve it for analysis.

NTSB has recovered the door plug from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX. NTSB investigators are currently examining the door plug and will send it to the NTSB Materials Laboratory in Washington, DC for further examination. pic.twitter.com/fqeemNeBPW

— NTSB Newsroom (@NTSB_Newsroom) January 8, 2024

Two cellphones were also found—one was discovered in a yard and the other on the side of a road, Homendy added.

Over 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes in the US have been grounded as a result of the incident. United Airlines and Alaska Airlines have canceled over 300 flights collectively following the FAA’s decision.

Homendy added on Sunday that Alaska Airlines had a fail light—which is used to signal failure in the control of cabin pressure—that illuminated on three flights in the weeks prior to Friday’s accident. She noted that the airline restricted the plane from flying to Hawaii in the event that it would need to make an emergency landing, and that a follow-up request for a deeper inspection had gone unfulfilled prior to Friday’s incident.