On January 5, Alaska Airlines AS-1282 departed Portland International Airport in Oregon, bound for Ontario International Airport in California. About ten minutes into the flight, a door plug, a panel covering a portal where an emergency exit door normally would be, blew off of the aircraft. Since then, the plug has been found and issues have been found on numerous other aircraft. Now, questions are mounting as an investigation tried to determine why this incident happened and why the plugs on other aircraft have been found to be not up to spec. Here’s what you need to know about Boeing’s door plug situation right now.
On that day, Flight AS-1282 was not a full flight as it hauled 171 passengers and six crew. When the door plug at row 26 was ejected from the aircraft, the force of the rapid depressurization ripped out the interior panel with it, as well as the padding from the window seats, cell phones, and other objects. The force was so strong that a shirt was torn off of a boy who was seated in 26C. Images from the NTSB seem to suggest that a seat frame may have bent during the event, too. The aircraft reached an altitude of 16,000 feet before descending down and returning to the airport. The whole flight lasted just 20 minutes.
Thankfully, nobody was seated in 26A or in 26B and the aircraft was just ten minutes after departure and climbing. Had there been people in those seats and had this incident occurred at cruising altitude, this would be a very different article.
Before I continue, I want to remind readers that our intent is not to scare you from flying to your next destination. The Federal Aviation Administration says it handles about 45,000 commercial flights every day. In a single month, U.S. airlines can shuttle over 80 million people around America and beyond. Airlines in America carry well over 800 million passengers each year. That’s literally thousands of planes in the air at any given moment, with tens of thousands of people safely reaching their destinations.
Sadly, incidents do happen sometimes. Thankfully, the vast majority of them don’t result in fiery death. A lot of it is thanks to the fact that when something happens, teams of experts identify causes and work to ensure the incident or accident doesn’t happen again. That’s what we’re witnessing right now with these Boeing 737-9 MAX door plugs.
So, what do you need to know about this developing situation?
Why These Planes Have Door Plugs
In my previous entry on this, I explained what door plugs are and how they’re different than plug doors. I touched on why planes have door plugs, but I’ll explain further here.
Safety is of extremely high importance in aviation. In an emergency situation, you have to be able to exit an aircraft within 90 seconds. That’s a minute and a half and it applies to everything from a puddle jumper with a dozen people to an Airbus A380 hauling the entire population of a rural American small town. To help facilitate this quick unloading, aircraft are equipped with safety features from emergency exits and slides to life vests and rafts for water landings.
The Boeing 737-9 MAX is designed to carry a maximum of 220 passengers. In order to enable the quick and safe exit of that many people, the 737-9 MAX is equipped with 10 emergency exits. The doors fore and aft are used for evacuation, as are the four common overwing emergency exits. Between the overwing exits and the rear doors are a pair of additional emergency exits. The MAX 9 is not the only aircraft with a configuration like this. To give another example, the Boeing 737-900 Next-Generation also has ten exits.
However, since cramming 220 people into a 737 should probably be a crime, most airlines configure their examples with fewer than the maximum allowable seats. The Boeing 737-9 MAX that operated Flight AS-1282, registration N704AL, was certified for up to 189 seats. Alaska Airlines was operating the aircraft with 178 seats. Thus, the two extra rear emergency exits weren’t needed. If you’re a passenger aboard an Alaska MAX 9 flight, the interior looks normal, so you’ll have no idea there’s a plug on the other side of your window seat:
Here’s a graphic showing Alaska’s seat map with the row featuring two door plugs boxed in red:
Boeing’s subcontractor, Spirit AeroSystems, assembles Boeing 737 fuselages, engine nacelles, pylons, and thrust reversers at its facility in Wichita, Kansas. Completed fuselages are loaded onto railcars, where they are transferred to Boeing in Renton, Washington for final assembly. Almost a decade ago, a train carrying 737 fuselages from Spirit AeroSystems derailed in Montana, producing a famous photo of river rafters floating by “crashed” 737s in the woods. We can’t publish that image here, so just click the link.
Anyway, the door plugs are initially mounted at Spirit AeroSystems, and this is one area of concern for the ongoing investigation. I’m going to return to the door plugs themselves for a moment. There is still a bit of confusion over how, exactly, these plugs work. Let’s look at Boeing’s illustration:
As I explained in the previous entry, door plugs work like plug doors. Many plug doors work by simply being larger than their openings. That way, the aircraft’s pressurization forces the door to seal against the fuselage. As our Lewin Day roughly calculated, at altitude, there are potentially thousands of pounds of force being enacted on the door’s fittings, so it is not going anywhere and you aren’t opening it. The other common way to have a plug door is to have the door forced into stop fittings. The door is not larger than its opening, but pressurization is still forcing it shut.
The door plugs used in the 737 are of that latter type of design. As you can see in the illustration, there are 12 stop pads and 12 stop fittings. These pads and fittings are taking the pressurization forces. The door plug also has a set of lower hinges, upper guides, and upper guide rollers. The plug is not officially a door, but it can be opened for maintenance or to aid in filling out the interior of the aircraft. In case you’re wondering, the plug weighs around 60 pounds.
When the plug is locked into place, two bolts are inserted into the upper guide tracks. Two more bolts are inserted into an area above the assist springs in the lower hinges. These bolts feature castle nuts with locking pins in them to prevent them from backing out. These bolts prevent the door from opening. Aviation journalist Edward Russell uploaded an image to Twitter showing loose door plug bolts in a 737-9 MAX:
Following @jonostrower's scoop on United finding 737-9s with loose door plug screws, a source sent this image of one of the door plug's lower hinge bracket with a note that 2 screws are not screwed all the way in. https://t.co/sz1d997PdL pic.twitter.com/d6hgHAEb2u
— Edward Russell (@ByERussell) January 8, 2024
What Investigators Have Found Thus Far
On January 6, Alaska Airlines grounded all 65 of its 737-9 MAX aircraft to conduct inspections. About a quarter of these inspections were reportedly completed “with no concerning findings.” Also on January 6, the FAA issued Emergency Airworthiness Directive 2024-02-51, which grounded all Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft in the United States. These aircraft will be able to take to the skies again only after they’re inspected and after any necessary corrective action is taken.
On January 7, the National Transportation Safety Board said the Alaska plane’s door plug had been located. The plug landed in the backyard of a Portland school teacher named Bob. The plug appeared to be in good physical shape and helped investigators learn more about what happened that day.
As reported by ABC 7 News, the NTSB has thus far found that the door plug appeared to be missing all four bolts that should have stopped it from moving. At this time, the NTSB is reportedly unsure if the bolts were even there to begin with. From NTSB engineer Clint Crookshanks via KGW8 News:
“We found that both guide tracks on the plug were fractured. We have not yet recovered the four bolts that restrain it from its vertical movement, and we have not yet determined if they existed there. That will be determined when we take that plug to our lab in Washington, D.C.”
This damage is believed to have allowed the plug to release from the stop fittings and thus blow off of the aircraft. The NTSB continues to investigate why all of this happened.
Since then, Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, the two operators of 737-9 MAX aircraft in the United States, have found loose door plug hardware on a number of aircraft. As Reuters reports, United has found around 10 of its 79 MAX 9 jets to have loose door plug parts. It’s unclear how many of Alaska’s 65 MAX 9 aircraft were found to have loose hardware but a statement from the airline indicated “some aircraft.“
The incident aircraft’s data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were sent to the NTSB for examination. As CNN reports, the cockpit voice recorder was found to be overwritten. CVRs run on a 2-hour loop. At the end of each loop, the data is overwritten. This is what happened with the incident aircraft as well as aircraft involved in 10 other NTSB investigations over the past five years. Understandably, the NTSB would like the standard changed from CVRs that record in 2-hour loops to CVRs that record 25-hour loops.
As the investigation continues, eyes are on both Spirit AeroSystems and Boeing. Spirit AeroSystems assembles the fuselages and Boeing finishes the aircraft. Investigators will be looking for where the process has gone wrong apparently multiple times. As of writing, the FAA alleges that Boeing may have “failed to ensure its completed products conformed to its approved design and were in a condition for safe operation in accordance with quality system inspection and test procedures.” Spirit AeroSystems is also working to help investigators understand the manufacturing process and again, to potentially figure out where things went wrong.
There is also some debate about whether Alaska should have grounded the two-month-old aircraft after auto-pressurization warnings were found on December 7, January 3 and January 4 flights. In response to these warnings, Alaska stopped the aircraft from making any flights to Hawai’i, which could have put it into a tricky situation if it lost pressure over the ocean. However, as PBS notes, the NTSB has not found evidence linking the pressurization warnings to the door plug blowout.
What This Means For You
As of right now, the greatest impact you will see is a canceled flight. United runs 79 examples of the Boeing 737-9 MAX while Alaska Airlines flies 65 examples of the jet. Hundreds of flights between Alaska and United are getting canceled. NBC News reports that 20 percent of Alaska’s routes are impacted by the grounding of the 737-9 MAX aircraft. Indonesia’s Lion Air also grounded three of its MAX 9 aircraft, even though they are of a different configuration than their American counterparts.
When will these planes take to the skies again? Well, the FAA says to hold tight, because safety is far more important than speed:
This incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again. FAA formally notified Boeing that it is conducting an investigation to determine if Boeing failed to ensure completed products conformed to its approved design and were in a condition for safe operation in compliance with FAA regulations. This investigation is a result of an incident on a Boeing Model 737-9 MAX where it lost a “plug” type passenger door and additional discrepancies. Boeing’s manufacturing practices need to comply with the high safety standards they’re legally accountable to meet. The letter is attached.
Every Boeing 737-9 Max with a plug door will remain grounded until the FAA finds each can safely return to operation. To begin this process, Boeing must provide instructions to operators for inspections and maintenance. Boeing offered an initial version of instructions yesterday which they are now revising because of feedback received in response. Upon receiving the revised version of instructions from Boeing the FAA will conduct a thorough review.
The safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 737-9 Max to service.
The good news is that when you take flight in a MAX 9 again, these issues will be resolved. If anything, now you know a new fact about commercial airliners. If you see a weird door-shaped blank panel at the rear of your next flight, that might be where an emergency door could have been located.
We will continue to follow this investigation and give you major updates as they come. Incident investigations often take a year, sometimes longer, so don’t expect the cause of these loose parts to be determined quickly.
My nephew’s girlfriend is an aviation mechanic (military). All I know is she’s very curious how this investigation goes.
From Aviation Week’s weekly podcast comes this gem of business-speak: Boeing’s CEO refers to this incident, and subsequent loose hardware found on other 737 MAX craft, as “a quality escape”.
Euphemisms. I just love euphemisms.
Not a euphemism. In manufacturing a quality escape refers to a defect that is not caught and corrected before leaving the factory. That is the common term
“The whole flight lasted just 20 minutes.”
“CNN reports, the cockpit voice recorder was found to be overwritten. CVRs run on a 2-hour loop”
How do does one reconcile these two statements? Did they just leave the CVR running for over an hour and a half after they landed before someone thought to pull it (from a plane with a big honkin’ HOLE in the side of the fuselage)?
I would expect the cvr “recording time is culmitive (over several flights) and only occurs under specific emergency circumstances.
yes, the pilots need to pull a breaker to stop the CVR from recording.
“In an emergency situation, you have to be able to exit an aircraft within 90 seconds.”
I can’t help but wonder why Southwest Airlines looked other way when allowing the “customers of size” who are morbidly obese to board the plane and to take up two seats. If the “customer of size” couldn’t sieve himself or herself through the narrow aisle and overwing emergency exit, he or she ought not to be boarded. They are endangering the passengers who could panic when they couldn’t disembark quickly due to the “clogged pipe”. Don’t tell me they can sit in the first bulkhead row with short path to the door: you never know if this door is unusable for the emergency evacuation.
It’s not fair for the very tall passengers with long legs to be ignored when requesting the seats with extra legroom or to have pay extra for those seats (that is if they haven’t been snapped up by the Lilliputians).
should that have been damm fine? Oh where oh where are you Ms Crabtree driving up to the teachers lot at grade school in your brand new chamois/tan Ford Fairmont Futura coupe to teach me proper English?
Mercedes does nothing but fine damm reporting!
Hey, the door may fly off in flight and you may die. But hey, since we rape you on baggage fees, your bag will be at your destination on time, never mind your jet just crashed . So, rest assured, while your immediate family listed with us is identifying your body parts, they can go through your luggage and grab what they want!
“ However, since cramming 220 people into a 737 should probably be a crime…”
Oh, amen to that! While the trend for cramming ever more people and travelling ever further in narrow-body jets might be okay from a safety point of view, it does not make for pleasant flying!
This is damn fine reporting, Mercedes. Through and well explained. Thanks!
Honestly, I’m in no mood to be on a Max aircraft these days. Fool me once.
Also, when this happened, the first thing I thought was: I bet it was the SC (North Charleston, SC) plant. Now it seems it was the case. SC is a Spirit plant. When Boeing spun off Spirit and built the SC plant it forbid its workers from Washington from going to train the SC workers because it didn’t want union sentiments to spread. The SC plant has had quality issues so bad that some airlines and supposedly even the US govt refused to accept planes from there. Such problems have included finding entire ladders in the empennage, strings of lights, and other such problems. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamliner-production-problems.html
wow. so maybe the weren’t any bolts? seems that will be easy to see “once back in the DC lab”. there should/is a clear and easy way to identify if anything was fastened to the studs/nuts that the bolts should fasten to. my uncle worked for NTSB. these guys are very good at what they do. people there have a very good idea of how this happened. they are just waiting for confirmation/for it to die down to say it
Spirit Aerosystems doesn’t have a plant in South Carolina, the South Carolina location is a Boeing assembly plant, which assembles the 787 Dreamliner, which is a completely different plane from the 737 and does not seem to be currently dribbling door plugs over the Pacific Northwest.
Spirit does have a plant in North Carolina, which builds wing and fuselage parts for the Airbus A350, which are shipped to the final assembly plant in France.
737 fuselages are built by Spirit exclusively in Kansas, which is a former Boeing/Stearman plant that was spun off as part of Spirit as a result of Boeing deciding to streamline itself into an assembler of components purchased from outside as opposed to a manufacturer. Spirit Aerosystems workers in Wichita are represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the same union that Boeing employees in Washington belong to, as Spirit inherited those collective bargaining agreements along with the factory.
Spirit builds 787 components for Boeing’s South Carolinian assembly plant at the Wichita factory as well as at plants in Oklahoma and Malaysia.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I had confused two different reports.
What. The only 737 assembly line is in Renton, Washington. The KC-46 is built exclusively in Everett, Washington. All of Boeing’s factories have had major quality problems, union or not.
That’s true, but it’s also true about the east coast plant having such serious problems at one point that customers were refusing deliveries from it. That was actually reported.
“When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
-Harry Stonecipher
CEO, Boeing
The Atlantic may be somewhat in decline, but they wrote well on Boeing’s decline.
They wrote well about it after the crashes 4 years ago, as well.
My educated guess is what is going to be found is a “break of inspection”:
– The plug was installed correctly at Spirit.
– Spirit’s QC inspected and found no issues.
– The build step was stamped by production and QC.
Now comes the issue:
– for whatever reason (could have been legit), The plug was removed. At re-installation, the screws that hold the roller guides were loosened to readjust the door pin guides.
– they were never re-torqued.
The last two steps were done without any procedure. Since there are no instructions, QC does not have a reason to look at the screws as no-one should have touched them.
We have now created the problem.
Root cause, IMO, is production removing the door without a procedure in place to do so.
Anyone working at an aerospace assembly plant that needs to undo stamped work must get methods and QC involved to make sure everything is put back properly and inspected.
Break of inspection happen often, but the professionalism of your production staff should make sure that the breaks are reported and acted upon properly.
Boeing and their supply chain have to instill the production team to raise their hand when this happens. It was there at one point, I don’t understand how it was lost, but undue pressure from management to increase production rates never help.
The lack of marks makes me think they were never actually torqued to begin with. I also question if the 12! Stop Fitting Screws/Bolts were installed at all. Think about that after looking at this photo. If even one had been installed it should have prevented the vertical movement required to detach the door. The magnitude of this fuck-up gets more astonishing the more I learn. I quite literally jaw-dropped when looking at the properly installed plug and finally understood what must happen for one of those plugs to come loose. My mind is blown at the gross negligence.
Yep, now it’s loading again. Sorry for the distraction. No idea why that was happening, but I did check it a few times. I’m going to assume it was just some X (nee Twitter) BS.
They don’t call Boeing The Lazy B for nothing.
The Lazy B nickname is a legacy of the pre-McDonnell Douglas company. They’d probably be better off if it were still true.
I don’t see how it is likely that it was unrelated to have pressurization issues on a new plane (<3 months in service) to the eventual failure of the door. How frequently does a typical airliner have pressurization faults without a future explosive decompression like what happened on AS1282. So that the NTSB is trying to say definitively that it wasn't related seems like dangerous speculation rather than fact.
The current speculation is that the warnings could have been from a faulty sensor. Keep in mind that the NTSB is very early in the investigation, so the facts can change over time!
Don’t these planes come with some manufacturer’s warranty? or is it less than 3 months??
If your 3-months old car shows a ‘check engine’ light you’ll probably call in a dealership to schedule a visit. When your 3-month old plane that you use to ferry hundreds of people at 30,000ft in the air in shows pressure warnings 3 times you just shrug?
From my own flying experience, airlines would sometimes cancel a flight over a seat recliner not working, but cabin pressure failures are ok? I don’t fly Alaska, and now I know why I should defintely avoid them.
Well that’s a fucking stupid and woefully ignorant take, to put it politely.
There were exactly zero “pressure warnings”. As in none. Zilch. Zero. Nada.
The “AUTO FAIL” annunciator go went off three times, including once *on the ground*. There is, in fact, a separate annunciator labeled “CABIN ALTITUDE” for “pressure warnings” as well as a cabin altimeter and an aural warning. Both times the aunnuciator went off in flight the system was switched to the alternate auto pressurization controller, the annunciator extinguished, and the cabin never lost pressure.
Nothing about saying they’ve found no evidence linking the two means they’re saying definitively that it wasn’t related. It means that they have no way of showing that it is. It could have been a sensor issue or any number of other things. I don’t think they lay public has a good enough understanding about how that system works to be confident about what those warnings could mean.
The reporting I’ve seen is that the 737 has three pressurization controllers, two automatic and one manual. The automatic ones alternate which one is running, with the other as backup.
On the incident airplane, one of the automatic controllers was faulting, but the other one took over as designed. The controller failure at this time appears to be unrelated to the door plug failure.
It feels like a dangerous assumption to believe that the failure of either automatic pressure control system, main or alternate was coincidence with the door plug failure especially when it was repeatedly occuring and getting progressively more frequent with the last two reports in the days leading up to the door plug vacating the aircraft but that’s extremely odd to have happened if it wasn’t related. It seems more likey the plane couldn’t hold pressure due to the door plug beginning to come loose than an unrelated fault especially with other aircraft in the max9 fleet also having loose bolts in the assembly but I don’t know.
Go through these.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=737+pressurization+site%3Aavherald.com&ia=web
How many were a result of door failures? How many actually ended up with the aircraft actually losing pressure? An auto pressurization fault that’s not accompanied by an actual drop in cabin pressure is *far* more likely to be a problem with the controller or an outflow valve than it is the door.
What? First, all airliners leak if even just a little bit. Second, how much pressure do you think the auto controller is going to maintain *on the ground*?
Same logic that concludes that the SARS-COV2 virus didn’t originate from a lab that performed genetic engineering on virii.
“Nope; no relationship there; none at all.”
Hey Mercedes, What happened to the loose bolt pic that was here before? Copyright issues?
Which loose bolt picture? The one from Twitter? I’m still seeing that one embedded.
I still haven’t heard an explanation of why the 737-900ER isn’t included in the AD since it uses the same design for the door plug.
Could it have to do with when they were assembled? I don’t remember if Boeing sunset the NG series when the launch of the MAX.
It is concerning that for a plane that’s pretty much the 737 NG with bigger engines and flight control software changes to account for the larger engines that Boeing is having such issues. And then finding out that the flight deck door coming open during a depressurization event like this is the intended design, which was not part of the flight manuals is also troublesome.
Assuming this defect was a result of manufacturing problems, this is going to give the anti-union crowd a ton of “talking points” about why unions = bad while ignoring whistleblowers that expressed concerns on the assembly line.
At this point it’s time for Boeing to clean house with fresh leadership but there’s no way that’ll happen unless the stock price is impacted. Gotta love late stage capitalism huh?
From who I’ve talked to, they redesigned the door plug from the NG to the MAX. That would explain why the NGs haven’t even been mentioned too.
Thanks, I hadn’t heard that. I’d just heard that they used a similar design.
NPR reported this morning that quality issues have been an ongoing problem with Boeing lately, noting debris from construction found inside panels—even empty tequila bottles. (Miniatures, I believe)
-shades of (some, to be fair) 70s autoworker attitudes with that detail, I thought.
it’s scary, but I’m guessing more of us are in greater danger from certain Altima drivers than from this
I still want to know why these doors weren’t locked in place with spring loaded pins in addition to the bolts. I’m sure there’s some reason, and I’d like to know it because it seems like an obvious thing to my eye.
What I find really scary is that in the picture of the loose bolts, it doesn’t look like they were ever tightened as there are no marks around the bolt holes from the washers like there would be if they had ever been torqued down. To me it looks like someone hand threaded them and then nothing else. Like they just totally forgot the tightening step, presumably on all those bolts. The castle nut has a nice permanent marker mark right above it, but nothing on other bolts. My current guess is that two different people perform the installation and each assumes the other performs the required step. Seems like a major checklist error.
Now for the swearing part. Each on of those twelve stop fittings is supposed to have a screw in it which should stop all movement. Where the fuck are those screws?! Were they even installed?! Even just two of them should have prevented release. The pictures I found look like those twelve screws just weren’t installed. If so, what in the actual fuck?! That would be eights bolts not ever tightened and twelve screws just left out. Roscosmos does better. Jeesh!
Shit, slather it in some red Loctite. Give’em a couple ugga duggas. Call her Old Man of the Mountian, she ain’t going anywhere.
That would have been better than my idea of Harbor Freight ratchet straps. Those hold thousands of pounds, right?
I don’t get why that seat was empty… I love to look out of the window, I would have moved there right away.
Also, just landed a couple days in JFK, and most of the people had their windows closed… I guess the crew forgot to tell everybody to open them… but nobody likes to see the NYC skyline at night from an airplane?!? wtf?
I’ve observed this more and more recently. People get onto the plane, sit down in their window seat, and immediately put the shade down, where it remains for the entire flight.
Don’t they appreciate that we terrestrial beings are currently *Flying Above the Clouds, as if by Magic*?!? How jaded have we become? I don’t understand it.
Yeah, I don’t get it either…boring people I guess
Personally, I hate windows seats , two people between me and the aisle, one in front of me, one behind me, fuselage on the other side, nah, too confining. I don’t want to have to wake up two strangers to take a leak
I’m with ya 100%. I’m an aisle dude all day. The window seat makes me claustrophobic. The only time my two seat cushions touch a window seat’s cushion is if I have the whole row, or if it’s the double emergency row and the seat in front is absent.
I attempt to get a window seat every time. Live in Chicago so just about every flight I take roughly matches my bladder capacity, and I’m a pretty big guy. 6’1 210lb but not fat and look about 180 until I stand next to someone that is 180 and then you see I’m just wider. Especially on non-united flights my shoulders are wider than the seat so I can at least lean against the bulkhead and not be rubbing shoulders with the person next to me, plus it’s a good place to rest your head if you want to sleep. (I think it was a flight on American I took about a year ago where the seat arm rests were barely big enough for my hips)
Not sure if you do this already, but a pro tip is to always wear a hoodie on the plane. Especially if you are gonna put your head against the bulkhead. They never clean that part and it is GRODY!
that, or I prefer to use a beanie as a pillow. In summer though I usually just use an alcohol wipe, or 2, or 3… til they come back clean.
That works as well, lol. I like the hoodie because it gives me another pocket for a water bottle or an extra aux cord or whatever. Plus, back in the day I’d sneak a puff or two off a vape and blow it in there. Yeah, I was that guy. No harm no foul in my book.
I’m a similar build, but maybe even wider – few pounds lighter, couple inches shorter. I avoid the window seats because the curvature of the fuselage forces me to lean inboard, even farther into the middle seat. Especially in steerage class at the back of the plane where my cheapskate self usually sits. My aisle-side shoulder may stick out 4-6 inches, but I can at least tuck it when the cart comes by.
But if you don’t sit in the window seat you’re the one being waken up so someone can take a leak.
Yep, and I don’t mind, but other people can
Aisle man here. I would rather be bothered 10 times than bother someone even once.
I also sit on the aisle for the Indy 500, where it is even a bigger deal.
Window seat is a safe space away as far away from the other passengers as possible. You can use the vent to create a cushion of air to shield you from the large coughing guy in the middle seat. And it has a view so you can present the back if your head to potential gabby wabbies. It does help if you have an iron bladder.
No, I like the airiness of the aisle, I know what clouds and roofs look like already
My spouse and I are both a little claustrophobic and we deal with it in the opposite way. She likes sitting by the window and I like sitting in the aisle. She gets comfort by seeing outside. I get comfort by not having crap hanging over my head.
Sometimes those window seats are much colder than the aisle. I have no idea about this plane, but I’ve noticed it in the past. Or, the person in that row could have been pretty tall/husky?
Oh yeah, I’m a window person. I love to watch the world go by and change under the aircraft. I could only imagine the view from the flight deck!
On some of the newer seatback entertainment systems the flight tracker gives you a choice of views, including right and left window and cockpit – which is a simplified Microsoft flight simulator representation, but it includes airspeed and altitude and a simulated front window view. It is kinda fun in a weird sort of way. Google says one of the vendors may be Rockwell Collins with a product they call Flightshow.
You know, I tend to try very hard to keep my tinfoil hat tucked in the back of my closet where it belongs, but…
::tinfoil applied::
I wonder if this story might be connected with the story about the digital torque wrenches that have been found to be hacked? I don’t have any experience in aircraft manufacturing, but I do in the commercial truck space, and I can tell you that the data from wrenches like those are the method that QC uses to make sure all the bolts were tightened during assembly. No one would know if they were lying unless it was caught during a calibration or something went wrong with a product before it left the factory.
Can you think of a better way to tank a near-monopoly like Boeing than to cause repeat safety critical failures in their bread-and-butter products? The ‘leverage’, financially speaking, is stupendous, in terms of dollars invested per dollar damage inflicted. And there are plenty of entities, personal, business, and national, that would stand to gain from such chicanery.
::wads up tinfoil hat and throws it in the trash::
On the other hand, “never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence.”
I’ll go with the last sentence. The picture of those two bolts look like they never had any force on them at all
Exactly this. The nuts aren’t even touching the washers in that photo so not an in/lb of torque is even applied.
“We’ll torque those up after coffee break”
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
Etc.
A good friend is a recently retired commercial jet mechanic. Wow he has stories.
I had to comb through some incident reports when I was working in aerospace. The best story I have is the one of a mechanic who forgot his sandwich in the air intake of an Arriel engine, behind the protection screen.
That was an expensive lunch.
I stayed a lot at a hotel across the street from a pilot training facility. It was interesting sitting around the fire pit at night listening to pilots talk about how they hack the medicals…
So now I have to, search for flights, search flight times, search for cost, search for plane type, if only plane is the 737 Max, search for seats not near row 26….Got it
seatguru.com is your friend 😉
Or just fly Airbus
I know you have to be objective and I agree that statistically commercial flights are very safe, but…
If I have a choice, the 737-Max will not be on my itinerary. We know about their compromised flight dynamics that are theoretically fixed and now we learn that the planes aren’t even screwed together right. What other half-assery is waiting on this aircraft?
Same here. This is the SECOND time this airframe has been grounded for significant quality issues: https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-737-max-accident-alaska-airlines-as1282-united-door-plug/
In fact, I’m planning to avoid all Boeing aircraft as much as possible for the near future. Luckily I don’t use air travel very often.
You aren’t alone. I fly a lot less than I used to but given the choice I’ll taking anything by a Max.
I think main problem with the flight dynamics was that Boeing in their quest to make the aircraft attractive by advertising minimal pilot training from previous 737 variants they withheld key information about the flight dynamics and processes surrounding stall recovery.
But, it also doesn’t help that the FAA bowed to Boeing’s pressure and allowed Boeing to self-certify the plane.
It was marketing over engineering. And then poor engineering to make up for the instability created by their bad choices.
Self certification of some parts of the plane is standard operating procedure in aerospace. You can trust me when I tell you that my certification colleagues were real hardasses and were sometimes worse to deal with than EASA. The question is, did Boeing take safety (and therefore certification) seriously or not. The FAA can’t check your entire design anyway, they need manufacturers to play ball.
That does make sense that the FAA or any governing body couldnt possibly vet everything on a modern plane. But surely the FAA could run it through some set of standard certification processes, or did I miss something there?
Nothing is ever standard as you’re supposed to test the worst case scenario for every part of the CS-XXX, which is dependant on design and operating enveloppe. Determining how you’re going to run a “standard” test can take more than a year if the EASA expert doesn’t trust you (it happened to me for icing).
This is the gospel truth. I worked with a QA guy who had worked at NASA during the Apollo era and he was hard as nails on inspections. No leeway of any kind. (Which was a good thing, but I’m not gonna lie–there was some muttering when I had to spend a Saturday reworking a map reader that might have been close to thinking about nudging up against tolerance at the top end of the scale.)
Amen to that! At times I was like “dude, you’re working for the company, not EASA, gimme a break”.
I spent months working on a 100+ pages document to justify a test matrix, and after dozens of rounds of proof reading it was sent to be modified again because ONE ‘s’ was missing at the end of a word. She told me ‘we need to make the best documents possible, if we catch an error, we fix it’. Words were muttered too, but I realize they were in the right being this togh now that I see Boeing’s fiasco(s).
There’s even disagreement about whether that was even needed, Boeing might have been able to not use MCAS and still keep retraining to a minimum, since the differences between the 737NG/737 MAX are still far less than between the 757/767 and the FAA always allowed a common type rating for the latter two
https://theaircurrent.com/aircraft-development/mcas-may-not-have-been-needed-on-the-737-max-at-all/
The plane didn’t and doesn’t need MCAS to fly safely, it (allegedly) needs it to perfectly replicate the flight characteristics of the 737NG without pilot retraining for the Max’s new dynamics
Boeing might have created their worst ever crisis entirely on their own, due to an internal overreaction to early test data