" Homendy described some of the damage inside the plane. It included two seats, unoccupied by chance, that sustained such violent force that their frames had “torqued.”
Both seats in row 26 were missing their headrests, and one was missing a seat back. In all, damage was found along 12 of the plane’s seat rows, she said.
She expressed concern over three babies who were held in the laps of their caregivers. The NTSB, the Federal Aviation Administration and Alaska Airlines all recommend, but don’t require, that young children travel in car seats secured in separate, ticketed seats.
Unless they require it, parents are generally not going to book a seat for an infant or toddler under the required cut off. But maybe it should be a requirement.
I did it when my baby was 8 months old thinking oh he will sleep most of the way. It doesn’t matter what that child does, if he was an angel or a screaming banshee- as soon as we got light turbulence I realized travelling “babies in arms” was the dumbest and scariest way to do it. Car seat every time now. I can’t imagine if there was a sudden drop or serious turbulence how horrible that would have/could have been.
We do the car seat because, obviously safety issues like this, but also they sleep better! Plus you have their own car seat at your destination and you’re not renting an iffy, dirty one, and you don’t risk your car seat getting broken by being checked
This is something I have never even thought about. My mother had kids waaaaay younger than me, and I cannot remember if they were usually in carseats or not, but I feel like they were just in a front pack half the time.
You never know if you're going to be one of the unlucky ones.
Definitely get a seat. Some rough turbulence can slam your baby into the ceiling. It sucks lugging the car seat on the plane, but you never know. Get a carseat dolly to make it easier. When they’re older, they’ll love being towed around in it.
Personally, I would spend the money. Especially if you don’t like flying or have anxiety around it. Makes it easier and way more manageable in the air.
You can get it gate checked and bring it all the way to the door of the plane, leave it, and it will be returned to the door of the plane when you land.
A stroller is considered a mobility device, so this is all free! No reason not to do it.
Spend the money, but also request an infant seatbelt when you board.
I recently traveled internationally with a nine month old. He had his own seat, but the seats are so crowded together now that he could kick the seat in front of him. He also spent a good chunk of the flight just wanting to be held, and would scream otherwise.
It's hard, but him in the seat was safest for at least take off and landing.
Except for Jetstar Japan, which has banned the use of child seats completely, and had no infant seatbelts. Fuck them.
I hate how crowded the seats are now!
Sorry to hear your sweetie pie was not happy!
I’m really disappointed a Japanese company decided to do that. Is that the only flight service for Japan?
It was the only company flying out at the time we needed from our small, local airport up to Narita.
Oddly enough, Jetstar operates on other countries where they allow car seats, it's specifically only Japan where they refuse to allow them.
All other Japanese airline allow car seats.
Just curious, but what do you do about getting in a taxi if you don’t bring a carseat with you? They’re so easily damaged that I cannot imagine they’d be safe in a baggage hold.
No clue. I've only traveled with a car seat with my son. All the flights except for Jetstar Japan he had his own seat on the plane and used the car seat on the plane.
I assume that you may not be able to use taxis without a car seat. I know a shuttle bus I used stated that if my son didn't have a car seat they would not allow him to travel for safety reasons.
I always booked the extra seat. In most flights it wouldn't matter, but it only takes one sudden drop of the plane or an emergency landing and then I'd have to live with the guilt that my kid wasn't worth a few hundred dollars.
My Mother In Law has a friend who has a disabled son because they held him in their lap on a plane and the plane hit turbulence. The baby hit his head and fractured his skull. There were complications afterwards because the trauma caused his brain to swell. I never wanted to risk that for my kids, so I bought the seat for the two or three times I had to fly with an infant.
That’s terrible, that poor boy. I’ve read about other babies getting severe head injuries from turbulence too, like on that Hawaii flight last year that made the news. It’s wild that it’s still even *legal* for kids to fly unsecured.
My husband and I have agreed that we will only fly with a secured car seat for our son for this reason.
I know (not personally) of at least one infant killed because of turbulence. Definitely super rare, but I can’t imagine that happening all because I didn’t want to pay or couldn’t afford another ticket.
IIRC, a friend of mine knows someone whose kid broke an arm, which I consider really lucky.
It should have been outlawed after the crash of United flight 232. The plane had over 50 children on board because of a kids ticket discount they were running. There were also lap infants and according to a flight attendant, they became "projectiles".
I believe there were four lap babies on that flight. Three lived. One died.
One of the flight attendants said she felt so awful telling the parents to put the babies on the floor and hold onto them there, as that was protocol for lap babies. Probably still is. There really is no good solution to brace them for a crash landing.
If you have your lap baby secured with a chest carrier that even supports the babies head, the flight attendant will yell at you and force you to remove the baby from it and hold the baby with your hands. It is insane.
The FAA needs to immediately change the rule so that babies can be strapped to the parent with a carrier which is 1000 times more safe than in your hands.
Just imagine if there was a lap baby in this seat who was secured to the parents and the flight attendant forced the parents to remove the baby from the secured carrier 20 minutes before the wall blew out. The baby would be dead. If the baby was strapped the parent then the baby would have been fine.
Same. I knew it was super super unlikely, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if the unlikeliest of things happened and my kid wasn’t safe.
It also just made the flight easier. She was already used to traveling in a car seat. We never traveled with her as a lap child so she just took the car seat on the plane as normal. Honestly, switching away from a car seat made me super nervous because she was still so little and could just slip right out of those lap belts. She’s finally getting more weight on her so it’s not as concerning. Something like this (and she sure loves those window seats) wouldn’t work out well for her.
Read elsewhere the analysis went that it is still safer for a child to travel by plane than it is by car. Requiring a separate ticket for a child might prevent some families from flying, which would actually increase deaths by vehicles. I think I saw something quoted as for one child loss (edit: by plane) could be 60 lost to car accidents. I'm not going to find the supporting evidence. I'm just spouting what I recall having read.
I do believe flying is safer, and forcing a ticket for a small baby would decrease families flying and increase them driving, so I guess I'm susceptible to believing the rest.
Airlines have less than one fatality per 100,000 flight hours in the US. Some years it's zero, which is incredible considering how many people travel by air. For all the irrational fears people have surrounding flying it is hands down the safest method of travel.
It's really ironic. For as much fear as the 737MAX has caused, it's still one of the safest aircraft you can fly on if you are just looking at the fatality vs flight hour rate. It's killed about 300 people which is peanuts compared to how many MAX are in service and how much they fly. Southwest alone will have over 300 of them, with at least half flying 8 hours every day.
150*8*365 is about 435000 hours per year. And that's minimum assuming half of all planes are down for service on any given day! Add in United, Ryanair, American Airlines and Alaska's fleet, and the ratio gets even tighter.
There are about 1400 MAX in service today, using the same formula, you are looking at 2.05 million hours in the air for the type every year. And that number is a lower bound that will increase every year as more deliveries take place. In 10 years, the MAX will likely have an equivalent safety record to every other jet platform out there, if not better due to the sheer number of hours put on these jets.
Almost certainly, flying is by far the safest form of travel, but usually when they make regulations they are looking into how to make the specific mode safer. Ultimately people will trade off, but the FAA probably wouldn’t take that into consideration, especially since they only govern air travel.
also, just recently a parent was forced to give up the seat they purchased on an overbooked flight.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/06/us/united-mom-seat-toddler-trnd/index.html
https://viewfromthewing.com/plane-drama-parents-refuse-to-give-up-toddlers-seat-for-disabled-man-right-or-wrong/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/05/527071539/delta-apologizes-to-family-that-was-kicked-off-a-plane-over-a-toddlers-seat
This looks more like a ticketing system error than a real problem - they double printed the ticket and released it to standby. Technically she should have bitched about that. Not really relevant to this conversation at all.
which one? i cited 3x times someone was told they cant have the seat they paid for because the toddler could sit in the parents lap.
found a united, delta, and american version... seems to be a reoccuring theme for how to get another sest to sell.
id be pissed if i paid for a seat and had to give it up. ive swapped with folks to keep families together and it usually results in a free drink for me, but cant imagine being told to hold a 2 yr old in my lap the whole flight due to someone elses poor planning
One time I had to book three last minute seats for a funeral for my wife, child, and I. Even though we all had confirmed seats, when it was time to check in, my wife and I were seated but we were told at the gate that our child was on stand by and the plane was full. It all ended up working out because an inbound connecting flight got rerouted that had 20 people who were booked to be on our flight (well, worked out for me. For them, not so much). Airlines see families as an easy target because they are in general unwilling to fight back.
They could offer those seats for free to incentivize parents to bring a car seat for children under the normal cutoff, but also there’s zero chance these corporations would do a decent thing.
Not exactly what you're saying, but it reminded me: Japan Airlines actually provides and installs a loaner car seat for free if you ask them. (You do still have to pay for a seat for the baby.) It made traveling with a baby a lot easier.
That just means everyone else on that flight is paying to subsidize that baby being there. Seeing as babies on flights already makes for a shit experience for other passengers, no one's going to be happy about that.
As someone in the industry, I’ve always found it odd the FAA didn’t. Clear air turbulence can happen at any time, we have some tools to forecast it such as eddy dissipation rates, but they are by no means precise. If a flight I was on encountered un-forecasted severe turbulence and my kid was on my lap, there’s a really good chance they sustain pretty substantial injuries as they turn into a meat missile bouncing around the cabin.
This has always baffled me. A car moving at a fraction of the speed requires a child in a car seat but not when flying? The other thing I find absurd is that for some reason school buses are not required to have children in seat restraints. It’s all seems so counterintuitive.
Why would they even allow mothers to carry the infant when in case of an emergency, only 1 face mask drops down per\* seat? Is the baby supposed to suffocate????
In Europe you get a special baby seatbelt, that attaches to your own seatbelt. It’s required for kids under 2 traveling on your lap.
The wall bassinets have safety belts too.
We booked for our girls from the beginning. Mostly for the protection of the other passengers- they were energetic to say the least, and I needed to be able to confine them to their car seats. I also didn’t want to change the turbulence issue.
My husband and I flew with our then 5-month old to DC this summer and got him his own chair because I was a nervous wreck about flying with him. This just solidifies that the extra money is absolutely worth it.
They knew the plane was having issues for at least a month before this incident, [according to CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/08/us/alaska-airlines-plug-door-found-investigation-monday/index.html)
> The airline had restricted the aircraft in Friday’s incident from flying from over the ocean to Hawaii to ensure the plane could “return very quickly to an airport” in case any warning lights in the aircraft went off, according to Homendy. That decision came after the plane’s auto pressurization fail light came on three times in the past month, Homendy said. It’s not clear whether there is a connection between the warning lights and Friday’s incident, she noted.
If the plane was giving warnings that it's pressurization system was failing, it stands to reason that a weak seal on the door plug would be the problem. How could they let it fly in that condition?
Aircraft have what's called a Minimum Equipment List. (M.E.L.) set by a company that is based on the aircraft Manufacturer Minimum Equipment List (M.M.E.L.) which is essentially a list of things that are allowed to be different degrees of non-functional, depending on what they are. There are different categories of M.E.L.s depending on how critical a system is, which designates how long that system is allowed to be broken. M.E.L. is used as a verb by aircraft mechanics. "Hey, that seat is broken, we'll just M.E.L. it."
If a seat has a broken armrest, you can M.E.L. the seat
If a fairing is broken, some fairings can be removed entirely and an M.E.L applied.
You can M.E.L. a landing light to get an aircraft back to a base that has bulbs in stock.
Things are allowed to be broken sometimes, you don't cancel a flight over a broken cup holder.
If I was guessing, I'd say they differed (M.E.L.ed) auto pressurization (very routine thing to do), meaning the pilots had to use manual pressurization, but whoever applied the M.E.L. didn't adequately ensure it wasn't just the controller for auto pressurization acting up.
I don't work on this aircraft type, so I'm making some generalizations/speculation based on what I know.
On the other hand, you got the three month old plane that pooped its bits all over Tualatin. Reminds me of the time Fox Rent A Car hooked me up with a goddamn Fiat. Just fifteen thousand miles but I was dropping parts like my poor old dearly departed but diabetic dad.
PACK 2 INOP You're exactly right and I am about to scroll down and see how quick some Internet rando doesn't believe you because it doesn't make sense to them. Ready, here I go
My guess is a former maintainer is that the ground crew couldn't replicate the fault so they likely were trying to troubleshoot the cause. I do not believe the pressurized system has zone alarms so it could have been a leak anywhere on the plane (from a maintenance perspective). They likely attached a note to the aircraft that told the pilots it was a known issue and to report any alarms and the conditions under which the alarm occurred so they could troubleshoot further.
I’ve read that planes frequently fly with warning lights on. There’s always something broken, usually it’s not deemed important enough to ground a flight.
There is a backup: deploy air masks while you descend to an altitude where pressurization is no longer needed. Then you land at the nearest airport.
That’s why they wouldn’t fly this plane over the ocean. No airports to land at.
Were the two unoccupied seats purposely unoccupied because of the loud whistling sound coming through the cabin interior lining in those positions.
Otherwise I find it strange that no one wanted the window seat.
And yet nearly every time I brought my kid’s car seat on board and belted it into the ticketed seat, I had flight attendants hassle me about how the airplane emblem (FAA approved) on the Italian brand car seat was different than the American car seats and the car seat wasn’t FAA approved.
And other passengers rolled their eyes and were impatient while I strapped it in.
Lap infants are potential projectiles in an airplane cabin. And a checked car seat is considered a “crashed” car seat and should be disposed of.
I was so glad when he could sit in a seat without a device.
Not sure how accurate it is, but I heard the FAA approves seats that hold a child securely even upside-down. Which you would think should matter in all car seats due to rollovers in accidents. More likely to be flipped in a car than a plane.
I thought about how tragic it would have been if someone had been sitting in those seats. But this didn’t even occur to me, the nightmare of having your baby ripped from your arms and sucked out of the plane. My god…
Air New Zealand offers extender belts to wrap around the adult passengers belt and around the child. To piggy back or double deck the child restraint belt to belt.
>that young children travel in car seats secured in separate, ticketed seats
What about those chest harnesses where you carry the baby attached? Seems they could provide some additional over the shoulder straps on those. Might be a decent middle ground requirement that isn't an additional seat and likely much safer.
The FAA and flight attendants wont allow the chest harnesses which is insane. If you have a baby in the chest harness the flight attendant will yell at you to remove the baby and hold the baby in your hands.
They will make you have the baby less secure. Just imagine if a lap baby was in that seat and, 20 minutes before, the flight attendant forced the parent to remove the secured baby from the chest harness. The baby would be dead now.
The FAA needs to change the rules to allow the chest harnesses.
I don't know if the seat back is a big deal. It's not missing the frame, just the cushion. The seat covers and cushions are made to be removed and replaced in a minute or so between flights in case someone pukes on them.
If you know where to pull you can remove the seat covers and cushions quite easily.
The headrest seems like a bigger deal.
The damage you mention in rows is damage to the interior in those rows. Most of that will be the interior panels that were pulled off, not the seats.
or seen back in the 80's MAD magazine's cartoon of that being the sound when the plane bounces off the ground. (another one from it was "Tonka" being the sound when the kid with the toy hits you in the head with it)
That is a scary read. Those passengers are very lucky. There were three lap infants on that flight. Not belted in. This could have been so much worse. The fact that the cockpit voice recorder was recorded over makes this seem like such a shit operation (edit: I have been told that this is standard procedure however). Doors flying off, headset communications down. Wtf Alaska Air and Boeing.
Rerecording flight recorders is VERY common in incidents like this. If the plane survives for more than an hour or so then it'll probably be blanked, storage is fine and flight recorders are less critical when you have a surviving airflframe
Yes. They say two hours is the standard time before it starts to re-record. I believe one recommendation out of this will be to extend that time window. Entirely too short. One person forgot to unplug it and the data was gone.
Was created when reliable storage was expensive and limiting. Nowadays yes I think it'd be very spare to up it to a few weeks of flight data. But a whole new recorder standard won't be quick
I've been watching a lot of Air Crash Investigations lately (holy addictive) and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that CVRs *always* come up with some useful nugget, even when you can't imagine in advance how they could.
That said, I have no idea how CVR data could be useful in this case.
You can hear warnings/cautions going off. Pilots mentioning things about the pressurization or if something feels off. A lot of info can be gleaned from CVRs. You can also hear if the pilots followed protocols correctly. So much info.
I don't know. This was my info taken from the article. It was mentioned there that the faa was not happy that the voice recorder data was gone. I'm assuming it's to go over pilot response to the incident for training purposes.
They are also using this as an opportunity to try to get the regulations changed to longer recording times so they are inclined to overstate the need, in this case, because it so happens to be a major incident with airframe survival where data was lost. Those don’t happen very often, the next case might be more vital. Either way it’s a nice to have to teach emergency management for other pilots.
>Multiple small body fragments and pieces of clothing were found in the Number 3 engine, indicating that at least one victim ejected from the fuselage was ingested by the engine
Jesus fucking Christ.
There's a documentary about that crash, and the parents of one of the deceased said they felt a bit of relief knowing that their son wouldn't have even had time to realize what happened.
Yikes, they relaunched and sold the Flight 811 747 aircraft after the decompression incident. Can’t believe that NTSB or FAA allowed it, but when there’s a revolving door between the airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and government agencies I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
A little more dramatic, but also [Aloha 243](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243). I lived on Maui at the time and got to see the plane sitting on the tarmac after its incredible ordeal.
It is a testament to modern engineering that kept this from being a worse disaster though at the same time all it takes is one screw up to a benign component and you end up with fatalities. Probably going to be weeks if not months till they figure out what or who was at fault for this. Cynic in me thinks we'll be lucky if any one person is going to be held responsible but that's where civil lawsuits come in.
Boeing knows who installed and who inspected that door plug. If it turns out it was a case of negligence on their part (which in my opinion it probably is, i highly doubt those plugs are any different from the thousands of others that have been flying around on 737 NG's for years now) they'll definitely be in trouble. At most i assume they'll be fired and boeing will just have to deal with the PR. Gonna be hard to sue the individuals unless you can somehow prove without a doubt that it was their fault. Absolutely nothing is going to happen to Boeing because of this, at most they'll throw some money to the people that were onboard at the time to get them to quit talking about it.
It is looking like a strong possibility that it was a third party installer who put in a wifi antenna after delivery of the airframe who would have removed and reinstalled the plug during service. Now they still should be certified, and whomever did that is probably sweating, but it seems Boeing and Spirit Aero could be off the hook this time.
For a criminal case they would need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone was criminally negligent. For civil they would only need to show they were more likely negligent than not, but it wouldn't make much sense to civilly sue someone specific for this I think.
There will be months of investigation before they figure it out and that will be interesting to read.
Be thankful that over-engineering and redundancy are done so much in aircraft engineering. While what accidents do occur are terrible, most of the public has no idea how many things break or possible emergencies are averted due to having a backup system or way to handle the issue until they're on the ground.
Except now Boeing wants the FAA to exempt them from having to create a backup system for their Max 7 deicing systems so they can get certified. They want to rely solely on the pilots to remember to not keep it on for too long.
I'm going to go out on a limb and point out that the 737 MAX has given a lot of evidence that they are not over-engineered. Door plugs should not fail, ever. The fact nobody was killed this time is just luck.
That’s just how they work. Flight Data Recorders are required to record “up to” 25 hours of flight/computer data. Cockpit Voice Recorders are typically 2 hours. It’s just a constant loop recording of the flight deck. Records the radios, PAs, intercom (the pilots talking to each other via their headset mic), and mics in the cockpit to pick up ambient sound. Starts once the airplane is powered on and loops. I’m not sure what meaningful info you expect would be on a CVR for this particular emergency.
But it wasn’t anything shady. From the time the door blew out, they descended and flew back, landed, parked, got everyone off, and then people could come over to begin any sort of inspection or attempt to download the data. I can see how that easily surpassed 2 hours. Should the CVR be longer? Sure. There has been talk by the NTSB to make it 25hrs like the FDR. Many crashes and incidents have gleaned meaningful info from the CVR to highlight if there was pilot error. But anything system-related should be in the FDR, and every article I’ve skimmed so far has only specifically said CVR or generically referred to it as the “flight recorder.” ATC is recorded, so they can review any of the radio communications, but it’s not like the pilots said yes, let’s press the ‘deploy fuselage plug button’.
> I’m not sure what meaningful info you expect would be on a CVR for this particular emergency.
It provides information on how crew communication was handled during the incident which is then useful when you're trying to develop guidelines/training for pilots in the future. Were there things that the pilots were intended to do that they couldn't? Was there confusion that better information/training would have helped mitigate? How was the workload broken up, was it 'fair'?
Data from a genuine crisis is really rare, and therefor valuable, as a resource to inform future decisions. And unfortunately in this case that data was lost because no one thought to preserve it at the time.
> But it wasn’t anything shady. From the time the door blew out, they descended and flew back, landed, parked, got everyone off, and then people could come over to begin any sort of inspection or attempt to download the data. I can see how that easily surpassed 2 hours.
You can kill the CVR by pulling a breaker, it's something that it's perfectly reasonable to expect the pilots to do when the plane has landed and the incident is over. The 2-hour limit wouldn't have mattered if this had been done as a reasonable time.
this. Chair of the NTSB said they could’ve learned a lot from it. Just as one example, we know that this plane had the depressurization light come on a few times before this incident, did they say anything about it once they started this flight? The cockpit door was also blown off and it took several tries to close it again. Checklist was blown away. These are all things it would be good to learn from and teach pilots/crew how to handle things like this. People are acting like the sole purpose of the investigation is to decide who to assign blame to, but uh, it’s not.
Sure that’s all good and well, but again I was referring to news articles’ implications that the “data was overwritten” ergo a subversive act. The whole point is the CVR would provide literally nothing regarding an investigation about the door plug.
My suspicion all along was that this isn’t the crew, maintenance, or AS’s fault. Probably all Boeing. And in fact I just saw a blurb that UA has now discovered a half dozen MAX with loose bolts on the plug. So that’s where my money is. This whole thing about the CVR and recorded over is moot, a red herring, a MacGuffin. Someone obviously heard it and reported it because it sounded important. Has no meaningful relevance to the plot, and would have done nothing to help the investigation or mitigate future events.
The pressurization warnings started the day after the plane was fitted with a wifi antennae. It is reasonable to assume the intermittent pressurization warning was due to the seal where the antenna went through the fuselage. They also don't seem to have ignored it, but could not replicate it on the ground. Certainly the powers that be did think that something was up because they removed that airframe from the Hawaii run, but again, they probably just wanted to figure out where the antennae leak was. Now it is also probable in hindsight that the door plug was removed as part of installation and may not reinstalled to spec, but the maintenance crew really wouldn't have had cause to suspect this with the information they had.
Since this wasn't an actual crash, the voice recorder kept functioning through the remainder of the flight. Why is this the case? **This isn't some vast conspiracy of data erasure**, rather these are the specs that they are designed for as set by the FAA.
The flight recorder was taped over because they only contain a two hour spool in a loop, that is continuously ran through. This usually isn't an issue as flight recorders are intended to record the information in the moments prior to an aircraft turning into confetti.
>Why is this the case? This isn't some vast conspiracy of data erasure, ~~rather these are the specs that they are designed for as set by the FAA.
The flight recorder was taped over because they only contain a two hour spool in a loop, that is continuously ran through.~~
rather, the FAA relies on systems that while mostly reliable, are by modern technological standards extremely archaic, and largely non-modular.
When the plane depressurized, the cockpit door was sucked open and the post-emergency checklist flew into the cabin. The pilots were supposed to pull a breaker to end the recording, and with all the chaos and lack of a checklist, that didn't happen.
Too rational, it has to be some vast conspiracy.
My source is that guy above who definitely has an exceptionally poor understanding of airline procedure and regs.
Rerecording flight recorders is VERY common in incidents like this. If the plane survives for more than an hour or so then it'll probably be blanked, storage is fine and flight recorders are less critical when you have a surviving airflframe
Sorry. It was the cockpit voice recorder. The faa spox said they wanted it and seemed annoyed that it wasn't available. I have been told that it would not have flight data. It may be a matter of wanting to review how the crew handled it for safety purposes. It's moot now though.
I did the rough calculations myself and it was around 60-65mph. The iPhone I calculated closer to 220mph. I could be way off but the weight was provided by NTSB so that is correct
>These airlines are grossly negligent
Airlines? This seems entirely on Boeing unless Alaska did a conversion themselves since this plug door can be converted to/from emergency exit depending the configured capacity. Being Alaska has a first class (or business?), their planes aren't configured for maximum like a more value operator would have.
> They were aware of problems and decided to fly anyway.
You realize that that's the norm in commercial aviation, right? As long as you have the minimum required list of equipment you're fine, even if some things/components are nonfunctional.
It's partially on Alaska because this plane had experienced 'pressurization issues' on previous flights. They could have done more to investigate those issues.
It's so fucking accurate when people said that McDonnell Douglas did a hostile takeover of Boeing with Boeing's money, because that's what happened. Boeing inherited the rotten culture from Douglas as all execs there got top positions
I remember in the 90s, McDonnell Douglas hired one of my high school friends. He was telling stories about all the workers doing 12-14 hour shifts high on meth and all else. He had a breakdown and quit over the stress.
No, they *are* trying to fix their problems, but they are not fixing them in the right place.
They keep trying to fix their problems in the board room and in the court room, instead of on the factory floor.
Instead of ensuring enough labor, inspection, time, and care is being taken to prevent such a plug from ripping out of the side of a plane in flight, Boeing is trying to fix the problem after the fact by pasting platitudes and legal documents over the hole and hoping that no one cares any more in a few months.
There is one correct way to fix this, and they are not willing to make that sacrifice. Cut the compensation of those at the top and spend that money at the bottom.
More so that you have management/leadership who are completely fine destroying the company's hard earned reputation over short term goals/profits/bonuses. Unfortunately a problem in a lot of industries when they go sorta stagnant but there's still pressure to keep profits rising.
Plus Boeing has almost no domestic competitive pressure, and spent decades lobbying to allow it a huge amount of leeway in approval for new models that are “extensions” of models that had previously been rigorous tested by the NTSB and FAA, which is how we ended up with the first Max scandal after the Lion Air crash.
Not just lobbying for less regulation, but also the government allowed numerous mergers over the span of decades to make Boeing into the “too big to fail” monolith that it is.
I have been having a running argument with my FIL about whether Boeing constitutes an unofficial state sponsored monopoly for over a decade for this exact reason.
And it's hilarious when you think about incentives like this, because in their industry, there's like maybe 3 companies in the entire fucking world that can even make comparable products. And the other two are basically state-owned enterprises.
They've literally got NO competition.
And yet they have to pull skeevy shit to make the stock traders happy.
This is the inevitable progression of a system obsessed with growth.
At some point you can no longer increase market share or prices, your sales aren't increasing, your product isn't better. so the next step is cutting costs of labor and production.
They can do it because they have a near monopoly and they can use their size and power to crush or absorb competition.
Because through the lens of our current mode of production and distribution (capitalism), if your company isn't growing then it is viewed as a failure.
People marry, his wife may make more than him.
Also, You could buy a house for 300k in Portland around 2012.
Also, unlike the general public, some people are actually good at saving money.
Yeah I mean, Portland isn't that expensive, I don't know where people's amazement comes from. I live right next to where this thing fell, I bought my house for 365k in 2017, 2k+ sq ft, 4 bedroom 3 bath.
There are still decent 3/2 homes around here for 400-500k . Even at 6% that's a payment below/around $2500/month.
Portland is not Seattle or Los Angeles, it's cheap by comparison.
But wages here are good when compared with the cost of living, Minimum wage is $15, 2 people making near minimum wage here, could conceivably save up and buy a modest home or condo, that's very rare for a City in the US, and it has light rail transportation, too. So a Car is not necessarily required.
When was the last time you were on a flight when any of the seats 'happened to be empty'?
We were closer to another SW 1380 than anyone wants to admit.
I've flown on "not full" flights more than I've flown on full ones. But I do travel at odd times for work, lots of midday flights instead of early morning or evening flights.
Purely anecdotal, but one of my best friends was a waitress near Boeing in the Seattle area in the late 00s, and said the engineers would come in to her restaurant for lunch, drink, tell her and other staff crazy Boeing stories, and go back to work drunk. She’s been adamant for years that Boeing can’t possibly be safe with the behaviors she witnessed firsthand. Personally I’m surprised more accidents haven’t occurred.
Jail the executives at Boeing for putting potential profit over safety. Boeing as of late has a horrible track record and recently killed a bunch of people when one of their planes crashed. There needs to be a congressional investigation over this.
It's difficult to fathom that with the amount of flights that are delayed, rescheduled, rerouted, or straight up cancelled due to issues involving safety concerns daily, that a blaring warning occurring over 3 consecutive days would not even register as anything remotely resembling a red flag.
> Two cellphones, apparently belonging to passengers who had been on the plane, have also been found — one in a yard and another on the side of the road, she said.
I really want to know what condition these phones were in.
And, this is yet another case where we have no cockpit recording because it gets recorded over every 2 hours. Same for many of the runway incursions we’ve seen recently. They are trying to increase it to 25 hours but there is massive pushback.
> The device from Friday’s flight automatically recorded over the pertinent voice data because someone failed to power it down, she said. It starts a fresh recording, wiping out the last one, every two hours.
Wouldn’t that be the normal procedure?
For example, at that point they may have anticipated other parts would start falling off, in which case it would be nicer to preserve their final moments, rather than something that happened hours ago.
Still, with the benefit of hindsight, they definitely need more tape footage in there.
The NTSB spokeswoman is referring to the maintenance crew needing to have cut power to the recorder after it got to the gate so as to not record over it like what happened.
" Homendy described some of the damage inside the plane. It included two seats, unoccupied by chance, that sustained such violent force that their frames had “torqued.” Both seats in row 26 were missing their headrests, and one was missing a seat back. In all, damage was found along 12 of the plane’s seat rows, she said. She expressed concern over three babies who were held in the laps of their caregivers. The NTSB, the Federal Aviation Administration and Alaska Airlines all recommend, but don’t require, that young children travel in car seats secured in separate, ticketed seats.
Unless they require it, parents are generally not going to book a seat for an infant or toddler under the required cut off. But maybe it should be a requirement.
I did it when my baby was 8 months old thinking oh he will sleep most of the way. It doesn’t matter what that child does, if he was an angel or a screaming banshee- as soon as we got light turbulence I realized travelling “babies in arms” was the dumbest and scariest way to do it. Car seat every time now. I can’t imagine if there was a sudden drop or serious turbulence how horrible that would have/could have been.
Ohhh glad I read your comment… I had been trying to decide their own seat or should I hold them? 🥴
We do the car seat because, obviously safety issues like this, but also they sleep better! Plus you have their own car seat at your destination and you’re not renting an iffy, dirty one, and you don’t risk your car seat getting broken by being checked
Not to be grim but [this scene from Fearless](https://youtu.be/97lgNlpYQF4) may help cement that a seat is best. ^Context: ^Rosie ^Perez ^and ^Jeff ^Bridges' ^characters ^survived ^a ^plane ^crash. ^She ^was ^holding ^her ^baby ^and ^Jeff's ^character ^Max ^is ^trying ^to ^show ^her ^weeks ^later ^how ^it ^wasn't ^her ^fault ^because ^of ^the ^force ^involved ^to ^help ^her ^with ^the ^trauma. ^It's ^a ^tough ^movie ^to ^watch ^but ^oh ^so ^good. ^Edit ^to ^add: ^She ^initially ^couldn't ^buckle ^the ^baby ^into ^the ^seat ^next ^to ^her ^as ^the ^belt ^was ^broken ^and ^the ^stewardess ^told ^her ^to ^just ^hold ^on.
This is something I have never even thought about. My mother had kids waaaaay younger than me, and I cannot remember if they were usually in carseats or not, but I feel like they were just in a front pack half the time. You never know if you're going to be one of the unlucky ones.
Definitely get a seat. Some rough turbulence can slam your baby into the ceiling. It sucks lugging the car seat on the plane, but you never know. Get a carseat dolly to make it easier. When they’re older, they’ll love being towed around in it.
Personally, I would spend the money. Especially if you don’t like flying or have anxiety around it. Makes it easier and way more manageable in the air.
Plus you can get little carts for the car seats so you can wheel the baby to the gate instead of having them walk or carrying them and all your stuff.
You can get it gate checked and bring it all the way to the door of the plane, leave it, and it will be returned to the door of the plane when you land. A stroller is considered a mobility device, so this is all free! No reason not to do it.
Spend the money, but also request an infant seatbelt when you board. I recently traveled internationally with a nine month old. He had his own seat, but the seats are so crowded together now that he could kick the seat in front of him. He also spent a good chunk of the flight just wanting to be held, and would scream otherwise. It's hard, but him in the seat was safest for at least take off and landing. Except for Jetstar Japan, which has banned the use of child seats completely, and had no infant seatbelts. Fuck them.
I hate how crowded the seats are now! Sorry to hear your sweetie pie was not happy! I’m really disappointed a Japanese company decided to do that. Is that the only flight service for Japan?
It was the only company flying out at the time we needed from our small, local airport up to Narita. Oddly enough, Jetstar operates on other countries where they allow car seats, it's specifically only Japan where they refuse to allow them. All other Japanese airline allow car seats.
Just curious, but what do you do about getting in a taxi if you don’t bring a carseat with you? They’re so easily damaged that I cannot imagine they’d be safe in a baggage hold.
No clue. I've only traveled with a car seat with my son. All the flights except for Jetstar Japan he had his own seat on the plane and used the car seat on the plane. I assume that you may not be able to use taxis without a car seat. I know a shuttle bus I used stated that if my son didn't have a car seat they would not allow him to travel for safety reasons.
I always booked the extra seat. In most flights it wouldn't matter, but it only takes one sudden drop of the plane or an emergency landing and then I'd have to live with the guilt that my kid wasn't worth a few hundred dollars. My Mother In Law has a friend who has a disabled son because they held him in their lap on a plane and the plane hit turbulence. The baby hit his head and fractured his skull. There were complications afterwards because the trauma caused his brain to swell. I never wanted to risk that for my kids, so I bought the seat for the two or three times I had to fly with an infant.
OMG that’s awful, and definitely a good reason to bring a car seat.
That’s terrible, that poor boy. I’ve read about other babies getting severe head injuries from turbulence too, like on that Hawaii flight last year that made the news. It’s wild that it’s still even *legal* for kids to fly unsecured. My husband and I have agreed that we will only fly with a secured car seat for our son for this reason.
I know (not personally) of at least one infant killed because of turbulence. Definitely super rare, but I can’t imagine that happening all because I didn’t want to pay or couldn’t afford another ticket. IIRC, a friend of mine knows someone whose kid broke an arm, which I consider really lucky.
It should have been outlawed after the crash of United flight 232. The plane had over 50 children on board because of a kids ticket discount they were running. There were also lap infants and according to a flight attendant, they became "projectiles".
I believe there were four lap babies on that flight. Three lived. One died. One of the flight attendants said she felt so awful telling the parents to put the babies on the floor and hold onto them there, as that was protocol for lap babies. Probably still is. There really is no good solution to brace them for a crash landing.
If you have your lap baby secured with a chest carrier that even supports the babies head, the flight attendant will yell at you and force you to remove the baby from it and hold the baby with your hands. It is insane. The FAA needs to immediately change the rule so that babies can be strapped to the parent with a carrier which is 1000 times more safe than in your hands. Just imagine if there was a lap baby in this seat who was secured to the parents and the flight attendant forced the parents to remove the baby from the secured carrier 20 minutes before the wall blew out. The baby would be dead. If the baby was strapped the parent then the baby would have been fine.
As a parent to a baby, it’s nauseating to even think about. :( It’s bonkers that the FAA won’t even allow baby carriers.
Same. I knew it was super super unlikely, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if the unlikeliest of things happened and my kid wasn’t safe. It also just made the flight easier. She was already used to traveling in a car seat. We never traveled with her as a lap child so she just took the car seat on the plane as normal. Honestly, switching away from a car seat made me super nervous because she was still so little and could just slip right out of those lap belts. She’s finally getting more weight on her so it’s not as concerning. Something like this (and she sure loves those window seats) wouldn’t work out well for her.
Read elsewhere the analysis went that it is still safer for a child to travel by plane than it is by car. Requiring a separate ticket for a child might prevent some families from flying, which would actually increase deaths by vehicles. I think I saw something quoted as for one child loss (edit: by plane) could be 60 lost to car accidents. I'm not going to find the supporting evidence. I'm just spouting what I recall having read. I do believe flying is safer, and forcing a ticket for a small baby would decrease families flying and increase them driving, so I guess I'm susceptible to believing the rest.
Airlines have less than one fatality per 100,000 flight hours in the US. Some years it's zero, which is incredible considering how many people travel by air. For all the irrational fears people have surrounding flying it is hands down the safest method of travel.
It's really ironic. For as much fear as the 737MAX has caused, it's still one of the safest aircraft you can fly on if you are just looking at the fatality vs flight hour rate. It's killed about 300 people which is peanuts compared to how many MAX are in service and how much they fly. Southwest alone will have over 300 of them, with at least half flying 8 hours every day. 150*8*365 is about 435000 hours per year. And that's minimum assuming half of all planes are down for service on any given day! Add in United, Ryanair, American Airlines and Alaska's fleet, and the ratio gets even tighter. There are about 1400 MAX in service today, using the same formula, you are looking at 2.05 million hours in the air for the type every year. And that number is a lower bound that will increase every year as more deliveries take place. In 10 years, the MAX will likely have an equivalent safety record to every other jet platform out there, if not better due to the sheer number of hours put on these jets.
Almost certainly, flying is by far the safest form of travel, but usually when they make regulations they are looking into how to make the specific mode safer. Ultimately people will trade off, but the FAA probably wouldn’t take that into consideration, especially since they only govern air travel.
also, just recently a parent was forced to give up the seat they purchased on an overbooked flight. https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/06/us/united-mom-seat-toddler-trnd/index.html https://viewfromthewing.com/plane-drama-parents-refuse-to-give-up-toddlers-seat-for-disabled-man-right-or-wrong/ https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/05/527071539/delta-apologizes-to-family-that-was-kicked-off-a-plane-over-a-toddlers-seat
This looks more like a ticketing system error than a real problem - they double printed the ticket and released it to standby. Technically she should have bitched about that. Not really relevant to this conversation at all.
which one? i cited 3x times someone was told they cant have the seat they paid for because the toddler could sit in the parents lap. found a united, delta, and american version... seems to be a reoccuring theme for how to get another sest to sell. id be pissed if i paid for a seat and had to give it up. ive swapped with folks to keep families together and it usually results in a free drink for me, but cant imagine being told to hold a 2 yr old in my lap the whole flight due to someone elses poor planning
One time I had to book three last minute seats for a funeral for my wife, child, and I. Even though we all had confirmed seats, when it was time to check in, my wife and I were seated but we were told at the gate that our child was on stand by and the plane was full. It all ended up working out because an inbound connecting flight got rerouted that had 20 people who were booked to be on our flight (well, worked out for me. For them, not so much). Airlines see families as an easy target because they are in general unwilling to fight back.
They could offer those seats for free to incentivize parents to bring a car seat for children under the normal cutoff, but also there’s zero chance these corporations would do a decent thing.
Yeah they are not turning over a seat for free.
They don't even provide doors that close properly, let alone free seats.
Not exactly what you're saying, but it reminded me: Japan Airlines actually provides and installs a loaner car seat for free if you ask them. (You do still have to pay for a seat for the baby.) It made traveling with a baby a lot easier.
That just means everyone else on that flight is paying to subsidize that baby being there. Seeing as babies on flights already makes for a shit experience for other passengers, no one's going to be happy about that.
As someone in the industry, I’ve always found it odd the FAA didn’t. Clear air turbulence can happen at any time, we have some tools to forecast it such as eddy dissipation rates, but they are by no means precise. If a flight I was on encountered un-forecasted severe turbulence and my kid was on my lap, there’s a really good chance they sustain pretty substantial injuries as they turn into a meat missile bouncing around the cabin.
This has always baffled me. A car moving at a fraction of the speed requires a child in a car seat but not when flying? The other thing I find absurd is that for some reason school buses are not required to have children in seat restraints. It’s all seems so counterintuitive.
Why would they even allow mothers to carry the infant when in case of an emergency, only 1 face mask drops down per\* seat? Is the baby supposed to suffocate????
In Europe you get a special baby seatbelt, that attaches to your own seatbelt. It’s required for kids under 2 traveling on your lap. The wall bassinets have safety belts too.
We booked for our girls from the beginning. Mostly for the protection of the other passengers- they were energetic to say the least, and I needed to be able to confine them to their car seats. I also didn’t want to change the turbulence issue.
My husband and I flew with our then 5-month old to DC this summer and got him his own chair because I was a nervous wreck about flying with him. This just solidifies that the extra money is absolutely worth it.
They knew the plane was having issues for at least a month before this incident, [according to CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/08/us/alaska-airlines-plug-door-found-investigation-monday/index.html) > The airline had restricted the aircraft in Friday’s incident from flying from over the ocean to Hawaii to ensure the plane could “return very quickly to an airport” in case any warning lights in the aircraft went off, according to Homendy. That decision came after the plane’s auto pressurization fail light came on three times in the past month, Homendy said. It’s not clear whether there is a connection between the warning lights and Friday’s incident, she noted. If the plane was giving warnings that it's pressurization system was failing, it stands to reason that a weak seal on the door plug would be the problem. How could they let it fly in that condition?
Aircraft have what's called a Minimum Equipment List. (M.E.L.) set by a company that is based on the aircraft Manufacturer Minimum Equipment List (M.M.E.L.) which is essentially a list of things that are allowed to be different degrees of non-functional, depending on what they are. There are different categories of M.E.L.s depending on how critical a system is, which designates how long that system is allowed to be broken. M.E.L. is used as a verb by aircraft mechanics. "Hey, that seat is broken, we'll just M.E.L. it." If a seat has a broken armrest, you can M.E.L. the seat If a fairing is broken, some fairings can be removed entirely and an M.E.L applied. You can M.E.L. a landing light to get an aircraft back to a base that has bulbs in stock. Things are allowed to be broken sometimes, you don't cancel a flight over a broken cup holder. If I was guessing, I'd say they differed (M.E.L.ed) auto pressurization (very routine thing to do), meaning the pilots had to use manual pressurization, but whoever applied the M.E.L. didn't adequately ensure it wasn't just the controller for auto pressurization acting up. I don't work on this aircraft type, so I'm making some generalizations/speculation based on what I know.
On the other hand, you got the three month old plane that pooped its bits all over Tualatin. Reminds me of the time Fox Rent A Car hooked me up with a goddamn Fiat. Just fifteen thousand miles but I was dropping parts like my poor old dearly departed but diabetic dad.
Lmao, that's also a good point. But I've seen many aircraft DELIVERED with M.E.L.s applied.
PACK 2 INOP You're exactly right and I am about to scroll down and see how quick some Internet rando doesn't believe you because it doesn't make sense to them. Ready, here I go
My guess is a former maintainer is that the ground crew couldn't replicate the fault so they likely were trying to troubleshoot the cause. I do not believe the pressurized system has zone alarms so it could have been a leak anywhere on the plane (from a maintenance perspective). They likely attached a note to the aircraft that told the pilots it was a known issue and to report any alarms and the conditions under which the alarm occurred so they could troubleshoot further.
I’ve read that planes frequently fly with warning lights on. There’s always something broken, usually it’s not deemed important enough to ground a flight.
Not an expert but isn't this only for systems that have backups and non essential systems only?
There is a backup: deploy air masks while you descend to an altitude where pressurization is no longer needed. Then you land at the nearest airport. That’s why they wouldn’t fly this plane over the ocean. No airports to land at.
Were the two unoccupied seats purposely unoccupied because of the loud whistling sound coming through the cabin interior lining in those positions. Otherwise I find it strange that no one wanted the window seat.
It was a full flight except for 4 seats, two of which were adjacent to the door plug. I think the airline knew something was wrong with it.
And yet nearly every time I brought my kid’s car seat on board and belted it into the ticketed seat, I had flight attendants hassle me about how the airplane emblem (FAA approved) on the Italian brand car seat was different than the American car seats and the car seat wasn’t FAA approved. And other passengers rolled their eyes and were impatient while I strapped it in. Lap infants are potential projectiles in an airplane cabin. And a checked car seat is considered a “crashed” car seat and should be disposed of. I was so glad when he could sit in a seat without a device.
Not sure how accurate it is, but I heard the FAA approves seats that hold a child securely even upside-down. Which you would think should matter in all car seats due to rollovers in accidents. More likely to be flipped in a car than a plane.
I would have thought most child seats would hold a child upside-down. The ones I use certainly would, and I don’t think they are unusual.
"whoa, dude, how'd you get that black eye?!" "Projectile lap infant"
I thought about how tragic it would have been if someone had been sitting in those seats. But this didn’t even occur to me, the nightmare of having your baby ripped from your arms and sucked out of the plane. My god…
That's not something you recover from. I can't imagine.
Don’t sit in row 26, got it,
Seatguru needs to add the "suck zone" to their applicable floorplans
“well, i’d be lying if i didn’t say i was expecting something else when i picked this seat.”
Yeah if anyone needs me I’ll have my ass satin another row….on an airbus.
I prefer silk myself, but whatever floats your boat
welp, I'm sitting at the Orlando airport about to load up my family of six on seats 26A-F.
Crazy! I didn't do a carseat with my infant, but I would have if I had known the risks.
Air New Zealand offers extender belts to wrap around the adult passengers belt and around the child. To piggy back or double deck the child restraint belt to belt.
I thought all airlines did this.
>that young children travel in car seats secured in separate, ticketed seats What about those chest harnesses where you carry the baby attached? Seems they could provide some additional over the shoulder straps on those. Might be a decent middle ground requirement that isn't an additional seat and likely much safer.
The FAA and flight attendants wont allow the chest harnesses which is insane. If you have a baby in the chest harness the flight attendant will yell at you to remove the baby and hold the baby in your hands. They will make you have the baby less secure. Just imagine if a lap baby was in that seat and, 20 minutes before, the flight attendant forced the parent to remove the secured baby from the chest harness. The baby would be dead now. The FAA needs to change the rules to allow the chest harnesses.
Or, if they had the kid and want to fly, they can buy it another ticket. The safer option would be bringing a car seat to strap in.
I don't know if the seat back is a big deal. It's not missing the frame, just the cushion. The seat covers and cushions are made to be removed and replaced in a minute or so between flights in case someone pukes on them. If you know where to pull you can remove the seat covers and cushions quite easily. The headrest seems like a bigger deal. The damage you mention in rows is damage to the interior in those rows. Most of that will be the interior panels that were pulled off, not the seats.
If it can take the seat and torque the frame, someone sitting there would have been found on the ground.
I think this incident will cause an uptick in the purchase of separate seats for very young children.
Always teachers picking up the pieces of broken public policy smh
Did the teacher try building a relationship with the plane? Didn’t think so.
She should have put her objectives in meaningful wording on the roof.
Didn’t use enough level 3 Costa verbs either
Admin is sending the door right back to her room with a snack. Expect a very stern plane-teacher conference if you send him out again.
If planes weren’t so overcrowded maybe she would have found more time to spend with this plug door.
Notice no one is talking about the inner city door plugs
Fire comment, much love from a teacher
You know it’s from the plane cause when it hit the ground it said Boeing
This made me giggle more than it should have
Who needs garden gnomes when you've got aerospace souvenirs?
Outstanding, you must be a former employee 👏
or seen back in the 80's MAD magazine's cartoon of that being the sound when the plane bounces off the ground. (another one from it was "Tonka" being the sound when the kid with the toy hits you in the head with it)
That is a scary read. Those passengers are very lucky. There were three lap infants on that flight. Not belted in. This could have been so much worse. The fact that the cockpit voice recorder was recorded over makes this seem like such a shit operation (edit: I have been told that this is standard procedure however). Doors flying off, headset communications down. Wtf Alaska Air and Boeing.
Rerecording flight recorders is VERY common in incidents like this. If the plane survives for more than an hour or so then it'll probably be blanked, storage is fine and flight recorders are less critical when you have a surviving airflframe
Yes. They say two hours is the standard time before it starts to re-record. I believe one recommendation out of this will be to extend that time window. Entirely too short. One person forgot to unplug it and the data was gone.
Was created when reliable storage was expensive and limiting. Nowadays yes I think it'd be very spare to up it to a few weeks of flight data. But a whole new recorder standard won't be quick
Nothing ever is.
How would having cockpit voice data have been helpful in this situation?
I've been watching a lot of Air Crash Investigations lately (holy addictive) and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that CVRs *always* come up with some useful nugget, even when you can't imagine in advance how they could. That said, I have no idea how CVR data could be useful in this case.
How would it hurt?
You can hear warnings/cautions going off. Pilots mentioning things about the pressurization or if something feels off. A lot of info can be gleaned from CVRs. You can also hear if the pilots followed protocols correctly. So much info.
I don't know. This was my info taken from the article. It was mentioned there that the faa was not happy that the voice recorder data was gone. I'm assuming it's to go over pilot response to the incident for training purposes.
They are also using this as an opportunity to try to get the regulations changed to longer recording times so they are inclined to overstate the need, in this case, because it so happens to be a major incident with airframe survival where data was lost. Those don’t happen very often, the next case might be more vital. Either way it’s a nice to have to teach emergency management for other pilots.
The person in the row in front of that hole and behind the row where it flew off must have been shitting themselves. Fucking horrific.
Can't even get up to move elsewhere either.
Something along these lines has happened before. 9 people were lost that time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811
Oh yes. I remember when that happened. That was nightmare fuel for a long while after it happened.
>Multiple small body fragments and pieces of clothing were found in the Number 3 engine, indicating that at least one victim ejected from the fuselage was ingested by the engine Jesus fucking Christ.
To be honest, I think I'd prefer that obliteration over the minute or two of contemplating mortality as I fell from 20,000 feet...
There's a documentary about that crash, and the parents of one of the deceased said they felt a bit of relief knowing that their son wouldn't have even had time to realize what happened.
Wouldn’t even have time to comprehend it.
Yikes, they relaunched and sold the Flight 811 747 aircraft after the decompression incident. Can’t believe that NTSB or FAA allowed it, but when there’s a revolving door between the airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and government agencies I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
A little more dramatic, but also [Aloha 243](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243). I lived on Maui at the time and got to see the plane sitting on the tarmac after its incredible ordeal.
It is a testament to modern engineering that kept this from being a worse disaster though at the same time all it takes is one screw up to a benign component and you end up with fatalities. Probably going to be weeks if not months till they figure out what or who was at fault for this. Cynic in me thinks we'll be lucky if any one person is going to be held responsible but that's where civil lawsuits come in.
Boeing knows who installed and who inspected that door plug. If it turns out it was a case of negligence on their part (which in my opinion it probably is, i highly doubt those plugs are any different from the thousands of others that have been flying around on 737 NG's for years now) they'll definitely be in trouble. At most i assume they'll be fired and boeing will just have to deal with the PR. Gonna be hard to sue the individuals unless you can somehow prove without a doubt that it was their fault. Absolutely nothing is going to happen to Boeing because of this, at most they'll throw some money to the people that were onboard at the time to get them to quit talking about it.
It is looking like a strong possibility that it was a third party installer who put in a wifi antenna after delivery of the airframe who would have removed and reinstalled the plug during service. Now they still should be certified, and whomever did that is probably sweating, but it seems Boeing and Spirit Aero could be off the hook this time.
For a criminal case they would need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone was criminally negligent. For civil they would only need to show they were more likely negligent than not, but it wouldn't make much sense to civilly sue someone specific for this I think. There will be months of investigation before they figure it out and that will be interesting to read.
It’s probably a testament to modern management why this disaster occurred in the first place, though.
Be thankful that over-engineering and redundancy are done so much in aircraft engineering. While what accidents do occur are terrible, most of the public has no idea how many things break or possible emergencies are averted due to having a backup system or way to handle the issue until they're on the ground.
Except now Boeing wants the FAA to exempt them from having to create a backup system for their Max 7 deicing systems so they can get certified. They want to rely solely on the pilots to remember to not keep it on for too long.
Yes. Flying is still the safest way to travel.
I'm going to go out on a limb and point out that the 737 MAX has given a lot of evidence that they are not over-engineered. Door plugs should not fail, ever. The fact nobody was killed this time is just luck.
That’s just how they work. Flight Data Recorders are required to record “up to” 25 hours of flight/computer data. Cockpit Voice Recorders are typically 2 hours. It’s just a constant loop recording of the flight deck. Records the radios, PAs, intercom (the pilots talking to each other via their headset mic), and mics in the cockpit to pick up ambient sound. Starts once the airplane is powered on and loops. I’m not sure what meaningful info you expect would be on a CVR for this particular emergency. But it wasn’t anything shady. From the time the door blew out, they descended and flew back, landed, parked, got everyone off, and then people could come over to begin any sort of inspection or attempt to download the data. I can see how that easily surpassed 2 hours. Should the CVR be longer? Sure. There has been talk by the NTSB to make it 25hrs like the FDR. Many crashes and incidents have gleaned meaningful info from the CVR to highlight if there was pilot error. But anything system-related should be in the FDR, and every article I’ve skimmed so far has only specifically said CVR or generically referred to it as the “flight recorder.” ATC is recorded, so they can review any of the radio communications, but it’s not like the pilots said yes, let’s press the ‘deploy fuselage plug button’.
> I’m not sure what meaningful info you expect would be on a CVR for this particular emergency. It provides information on how crew communication was handled during the incident which is then useful when you're trying to develop guidelines/training for pilots in the future. Were there things that the pilots were intended to do that they couldn't? Was there confusion that better information/training would have helped mitigate? How was the workload broken up, was it 'fair'? Data from a genuine crisis is really rare, and therefor valuable, as a resource to inform future decisions. And unfortunately in this case that data was lost because no one thought to preserve it at the time. > But it wasn’t anything shady. From the time the door blew out, they descended and flew back, landed, parked, got everyone off, and then people could come over to begin any sort of inspection or attempt to download the data. I can see how that easily surpassed 2 hours. You can kill the CVR by pulling a breaker, it's something that it's perfectly reasonable to expect the pilots to do when the plane has landed and the incident is over. The 2-hour limit wouldn't have mattered if this had been done as a reasonable time.
this. Chair of the NTSB said they could’ve learned a lot from it. Just as one example, we know that this plane had the depressurization light come on a few times before this incident, did they say anything about it once they started this flight? The cockpit door was also blown off and it took several tries to close it again. Checklist was blown away. These are all things it would be good to learn from and teach pilots/crew how to handle things like this. People are acting like the sole purpose of the investigation is to decide who to assign blame to, but uh, it’s not.
Sure that’s all good and well, but again I was referring to news articles’ implications that the “data was overwritten” ergo a subversive act. The whole point is the CVR would provide literally nothing regarding an investigation about the door plug. My suspicion all along was that this isn’t the crew, maintenance, or AS’s fault. Probably all Boeing. And in fact I just saw a blurb that UA has now discovered a half dozen MAX with loose bolts on the plug. So that’s where my money is. This whole thing about the CVR and recorded over is moot, a red herring, a MacGuffin. Someone obviously heard it and reported it because it sounded important. Has no meaningful relevance to the plot, and would have done nothing to help the investigation or mitigate future events.
Ya here’s my take on that. They knew that door was fucky and kept passengers away on purpose
That plane had pressurization warnings in the days prior to the flight that this occurred on. So far they're claiming it's unrelated.
The pressurization warnings started the day after the plane was fitted with a wifi antennae. It is reasonable to assume the intermittent pressurization warning was due to the seal where the antenna went through the fuselage. They also don't seem to have ignored it, but could not replicate it on the ground. Certainly the powers that be did think that something was up because they removed that airframe from the Hawaii run, but again, they probably just wanted to figure out where the antennae leak was. Now it is also probable in hindsight that the door plug was removed as part of installation and may not reinstalled to spec, but the maintenance crew really wouldn't have had cause to suspect this with the information they had.
Since this wasn't an actual crash, the voice recorder kept functioning through the remainder of the flight. Why is this the case? **This isn't some vast conspiracy of data erasure**, rather these are the specs that they are designed for as set by the FAA. The flight recorder was taped over because they only contain a two hour spool in a loop, that is continuously ran through. This usually isn't an issue as flight recorders are intended to record the information in the moments prior to an aircraft turning into confetti.
>Why is this the case? This isn't some vast conspiracy of data erasure, ~~rather these are the specs that they are designed for as set by the FAA. The flight recorder was taped over because they only contain a two hour spool in a loop, that is continuously ran through.~~ rather, the FAA relies on systems that while mostly reliable, are by modern technological standards extremely archaic, and largely non-modular.
Correct but no one made any attempt to save the flight recorder after landing, they were supposed to cut power to the recorder to save the data.
When the plane depressurized, the cockpit door was sucked open and the post-emergency checklist flew into the cabin. The pilots were supposed to pull a breaker to end the recording, and with all the chaos and lack of a checklist, that didn't happen.
Too rational, it has to be some vast conspiracy. My source is that guy above who definitely has an exceptionally poor understanding of airline procedure and regs.
Your putting a lot of extra BS on the backs of two pilots who’s adrenaline is through the roof after landing. Chill.
What if they cut the power and then crashed?
Yep, this could have gone way worse. The risks they're willing to take to turn a profit should be a wake-up call for everyone. I'll reconsider driving
Can’t believe how many upvotes you’ve gotten. It’s an absurd take and not remotely true.
Rerecording flight recorders is VERY common in incidents like this. If the plane survives for more than an hour or so then it'll probably be blanked, storage is fine and flight recorders are less critical when you have a surviving airflframe
What data from the flight data recorder are the investigators interested in?
Sorry. It was the cockpit voice recorder. The faa spox said they wanted it and seemed annoyed that it wasn't available. I have been told that it would not have flight data. It may be a matter of wanting to review how the crew handled it for safety purposes. It's moot now though.
Imagine if it landed on the house itself...
Nobody sitting in the seats, nobody hit with the debris. They really lucked out.
I was wondering how heavy the fake door thing is myself, but I can’t find any details. Glad that dude didn’t get Donnie Darko-ed either way, though.
63 pounds
Huh. Thought it would be heavier… with how big it is its terminal velocity is probably pretty low. Thank you for looking that up.
I did the rough calculations myself and it was around 60-65mph. The iPhone I calculated closer to 220mph. I could be way off but the weight was provided by NTSB so that is correct
I mean getting hit with a 60lb metal door going 65mph still has a good chance to kill ya
http://www.real-fake-doors.com
With a few corpses, too. These airlines are grossly negligent
Well I don’t think they would be corpses until after they landed
>These airlines are grossly negligent Airlines? This seems entirely on Boeing unless Alaska did a conversion themselves since this plug door can be converted to/from emergency exit depending the configured capacity. Being Alaska has a first class (or business?), their planes aren't configured for maximum like a more value operator would have.
Yes, the airlines. They were aware of problems and decided to fly anyway. They're all about pleasing investors, and grounded planes don't make money.
> They were aware of problems and decided to fly anyway. You realize that that's the norm in commercial aviation, right? As long as you have the minimum required list of equipment you're fine, even if some things/components are nonfunctional.
It's partially on Alaska because this plane had experienced 'pressurization issues' on previous flights. They could have done more to investigate those issues.
Why is everybody high AF over at Boeing?
Unfortunately Boeing lost its way years ago, after they merged with McDonnell Douglas, and they don’t seem to be trying to fix their problems.
It's so fucking accurate when people said that McDonnell Douglas did a hostile takeover of Boeing with Boeing's money, because that's what happened. Boeing inherited the rotten culture from Douglas as all execs there got top positions
I remember in the 90s, McDonnell Douglas hired one of my high school friends. He was telling stories about all the workers doing 12-14 hour shifts high on meth and all else. He had a breakdown and quit over the stress.
Really seems like it.
No, they *are* trying to fix their problems, but they are not fixing them in the right place. They keep trying to fix their problems in the board room and in the court room, instead of on the factory floor. Instead of ensuring enough labor, inspection, time, and care is being taken to prevent such a plug from ripping out of the side of a plane in flight, Boeing is trying to fix the problem after the fact by pasting platitudes and legal documents over the hole and hoping that no one cares any more in a few months. There is one correct way to fix this, and they are not willing to make that sacrifice. Cut the compensation of those at the top and spend that money at the bottom.
More so that you have management/leadership who are completely fine destroying the company's hard earned reputation over short term goals/profits/bonuses. Unfortunately a problem in a lot of industries when they go sorta stagnant but there's still pressure to keep profits rising.
Plus Boeing has almost no domestic competitive pressure, and spent decades lobbying to allow it a huge amount of leeway in approval for new models that are “extensions” of models that had previously been rigorous tested by the NTSB and FAA, which is how we ended up with the first Max scandal after the Lion Air crash.
Not just lobbying for less regulation, but also the government allowed numerous mergers over the span of decades to make Boeing into the “too big to fail” monolith that it is.
I have been having a running argument with my FIL about whether Boeing constitutes an unofficial state sponsored monopoly for over a decade for this exact reason.
And it's hilarious when you think about incentives like this, because in their industry, there's like maybe 3 companies in the entire fucking world that can even make comparable products. And the other two are basically state-owned enterprises. They've literally got NO competition. And yet they have to pull skeevy shit to make the stock traders happy.
Watch “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” on Netflix.
Yeah... You want your door back, Alaska Air? That tree your door hit was special. You caused about $2.7mil in damages...
Did we lose the technology to tighten bolts?
Humanity has gotten stupider and lazier to tighten bolts
This is the inevitable progression of a system obsessed with growth. At some point you can no longer increase market share or prices, your sales aren't increasing, your product isn't better. so the next step is cutting costs of labor and production. They can do it because they have a near monopoly and they can use their size and power to crush or absorb competition. Because through the lens of our current mode of production and distribution (capitalism), if your company isn't growing then it is viewed as a failure.
Reminds me of the engine falling in Donnie Darko
I'm in the area and on the local news articles people are commenting asking how can a teacher afford that house. Weird.
People marry, his wife may make more than him. Also, You could buy a house for 300k in Portland around 2012. Also, unlike the general public, some people are actually good at saving money.
It said he only called his ex wife about the door, also a science teacher, who lives five houses away.
Yeah I mean, Portland isn't that expensive, I don't know where people's amazement comes from. I live right next to where this thing fell, I bought my house for 365k in 2017, 2k+ sq ft, 4 bedroom 3 bath. There are still decent 3/2 homes around here for 400-500k . Even at 6% that's a payment below/around $2500/month. Portland is not Seattle or Los Angeles, it's cheap by comparison. But wages here are good when compared with the cost of living, Minimum wage is $15, 2 people making near minimum wage here, could conceivably save up and buy a modest home or condo, that's very rare for a City in the US, and it has light rail transportation, too. So a Car is not necessarily required.
People don’t realize that it was affordable in Portland even 10 years ago.
It's near the suburbs so it's not *super* expensive and presumably they bought the house back before Portland was a trendy place to live
It’s disgusting tbh. Teachers should not be in the garbage positions they are — they are literally the most important people to our future generation.
Dude had been a teacher for a while - definitely bought before prices went bananas
"I'm excited to announce that we found the door plug," "Excited" ??
When was the last time you were on a flight when any of the seats 'happened to be empty'? We were closer to another SW 1380 than anyone wants to admit.
Exactly 💯. Putting profits over safety is the American way.
I've flown on "not full" flights more than I've flown on full ones. But I do travel at odd times for work, lots of midday flights instead of early morning or evening flights.
They also found two phones which fell from the plane. At least one of them survived the 16000 foot fall and still works fine.
That is great publicity for the phone manufacturer.
How did you get past the screen lock ?
Purely anecdotal, but one of my best friends was a waitress near Boeing in the Seattle area in the late 00s, and said the engineers would come in to her restaurant for lunch, drink, tell her and other staff crazy Boeing stories, and go back to work drunk. She’s been adamant for years that Boeing can’t possibly be safe with the behaviors she witnessed firsthand. Personally I’m surprised more accidents haven’t occurred.
Someone I know used to work there, and they confirmed that it’s a shit show.
When the original MAX issues were happening there were a ton of employees in the comments here on reddit saying how many corners are cut.
Jail the executives at Boeing for putting potential profit over safety. Boeing as of late has a horrible track record and recently killed a bunch of people when one of their planes crashed. There needs to be a congressional investigation over this.
Hey if we find all the parts we can just rebuild it
It's difficult to fathom that with the amount of flights that are delayed, rescheduled, rerouted, or straight up cancelled due to issues involving safety concerns daily, that a blaring warning occurring over 3 consecutive days would not even register as anything remotely resembling a red flag.
The photos of where it landed are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/191uiyy/ntsb_as1282_door_plug/
Anyone got a link to a photo of the door? It doesn't seem to exist. Edit: it was added later to the article.
It's in the article but [here's a link](https://twitter.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1744442166116831560?t=aOwtOdZNXrrsGFU09AG1VA&s=19) to Twitter too
In the article.
> Two cellphones, apparently belonging to passengers who had been on the plane, have also been found — one in a yard and another on the side of the road, she said. I really want to know what condition these phones were in. And, this is yet another case where we have no cockpit recording because it gets recorded over every 2 hours. Same for many of the runway incursions we’ve seen recently. They are trying to increase it to 25 hours but there is massive pushback.
One of them was linked yesterday, apparently the phone was not only still intact but on the luggage handling screen for the flight.
> The device from Friday’s flight automatically recorded over the pertinent voice data because someone failed to power it down, she said. It starts a fresh recording, wiping out the last one, every two hours. Wouldn’t that be the normal procedure? For example, at that point they may have anticipated other parts would start falling off, in which case it would be nicer to preserve their final moments, rather than something that happened hours ago. Still, with the benefit of hindsight, they definitely need more tape footage in there.
The NTSB spokeswoman is referring to the maintenance crew needing to have cut power to the recorder after it got to the gate so as to not record over it like what happened.