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A treasure trove of newly-released documents by federal investigators describes the chaotic moments directly after a door plug blowout on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 earlier this year.
“We were just having idle chatter when the explosive decompression happened,” before there was an “extremely loud bang,” an unnamed flight attendant told investigators, according to documents released ahead of a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) hearing last week.
“It was chaos,” another member of the crew said, according to documents.
Due to a variety of factors, members of the crew were left scrambling to keep both themselves and passengers safe. Flight attendants were strapped into their jump seats in the galley and unsure what was going on, plus they couldn’t see into the cabin and needed to equip their oxygen masks. It wasn’t until the automatic announcement system declared a decompression had occurred that they knew what had happened.
In the cockpit, communication was difficult due to the noise; headsets flew off and taking of oxygen masks to speak created a squealing noise, according to the documents. The noise caused by the decompression also prevented flight attendants from checking in with the flight desk; one flight attendant told the NTSB that the “scariest thing” was that they didn’t know “if we have pilots” until they were eventually able to get in touch with them.
“At the point where I first saw the hole, I saw five empty seats,” a flight attendant told the NTSB. “I was absolutely certain that we had lost people out of the hole and that we had casualties.”
The plane managed to make a safe landing in Portland, Oregon, and no one was seriously injured in the incident. But debris, passengers’ phones, and clothing were sucked into the sky. Passengers were rattled by the incident, and at least one passenger was bruised, according to the documents.
The Jan. 5 incident resulted in a series of federal investigation into Boeing — which made the plane, a 737 Max 9 — and Sprit Aerosystems, a key supplier involved in the jet’s construction. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said last week during the agency’s hearings that passengers were traumatized and that unseen injuries such as theirs can have “lasting impacts on lives and livelihoods.”
The scandal caused by the blowout has prompted more “boots on the ground” inspecting Boeing and Spirit’s operations. An initial investigation by the NTSB found that four key bolts that were supposed to keep the door plug in place were not reinstalled during the plane’s production.
-Melvin Backman contributed to this story.