On January 5th, 2024, the door of an Alaskan Airlines flight blew out 20 minutes after they departed. The passengers were in shock and began to panic with oxygen masks being dropped. A warning was given by a member of the US National Transportation Safety Board(NTSB) before the incident, though it is not known if the incident had any correlation to the warning.
The (NTSB) restricted planes from taking long-haul, over-water flights, even though it wasn’t that long of a flight and wasn’t even over water, the door blew out not long after departure. An additional safety check was requested but not completed, this could have prevented the incident. After losing a part of its fuselage, the plane made an emergency landing at the same city of departure. There were 177 passengers on board including some of the crew, luckily, none of them were killed.
It is reported that the door landed in a Portland citizen’s backyard after falling 16,000 feet. Because of this blowout, Alaskan Airlines has canceled or delayed almost every flight. Some 171 planes remained grounded as safety checks took place. The warning on long over-water flights will likely return.
The plane was brand new so deterioration could not have been a factor and it was most likely an issue with the manufacturing process. The force of the blowout caused the door of the cockpit to open and a laminated checklist and the first officer’s headset both flew out into the cabin. Two mobile phones believed to have fallen from the aircraft are also reported to have been found. No information from the cockpit voice recorder was available, as the recording had been automatically wiped after a two-hour cut-off was reached.
After hours of searching, the door was found in a Portland citizen’s backyard whose name was Bob, officials say that it was the “key missing component” to work out why the blowout happened. Passengers were quoted as saying that a young boy seated near the affected area had his shirt ripped off by the force of the decompression. Luckily, no one flew out, but the flight was still very chaotic and terrifying, even earning the name “A Trip From Hell”.
