Earlier this month, an Alaska Airlines flight, Flight 1282, had to make an emergency landing just 20 minutes after the flight’s takeoff. This emergency landing was due to a blown door plug in the Boeing 737 Max 9 in which the flight was taking place on. Passengers were left terrified after they heard a loud banging sound. Oxygen masks dropped down from the overhead panels as the cabin of the plane lost pressure, adding more panic and fear to what the passengers were feeling. Since, both Boeing and Alaska Airlines have been under fire, now both even being taken to court over the matter.
About one week after the incident, passengers of the plane filed a lawsuit against just Boeing.
As of January 17th, a second lawsuit has been filed against both Boeing and Alaska Airlines. This second lawsuit is on behalf of four passengers. The passengers range in age, from 20 to 49, and range in careers, from a student to a business analyst. Two live in Washington, from which the flight was taking off from, and two live in California, in which the flight was scheduled to land in.
Some of the passengers have shared that they were truly fearing for their lives at the time of the incident. One passenger shared text messages that he sent to his mother while on the flight. In the text messages he informed his mother that the “plane depressed,” that they were in masks, and that he loves her.
Since the filing of these lawsuits, Boeing has announced work to better their safety checks.
Stan Deal, the CEO of Boeing’s commercial airplanes division, contacted all Boeing employees to update them on changes that they are implementing. First, he stated that they will be bringing in an outside third party to go over and potentially rework the quality management system they currently have. Additionally, more frequent inspections will be done overall at Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, who is the company that installs the actual door plugs, which is the root of this incident.
Boeing has already implemented newer safety protocols over the years after having several incidents occur in 2018 and 2019. An investigation of these crashes reported that “a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers” was responsible. It is unknown if there is any possible connection between what occurred for these crashes and what occurred on January 5th, but nonetheless several investigations and changes are being done.
