America's FAA Temporarily Grounds All Boeing 737 Max 9s - After a Window Blows Off In-Flight (cnn.com) 148
Today America's Federal Aviation Administration "ordered the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft," reports CNN, identifying the aircraft as "the model involved in an Alaska Airlines emergency landing in Oregon on Friday after a section of the plane apparently blew out in midflight."
A passenger's video posted to social media shows a side section of the fuselage, where a window would have been, missing — exposing passengers to the outside air. The video, which appears to have been taken from several rows behind the incident, shows oxygen masks deployed throughout the airplane, and least two people sitting near and just behind the missing section...
The plane "landed safely back at Portland International Airport with 171 guests and six crew members," the airline said... According to FlightAware, the flight was airborne for about 20 minutes.
"There was a really loud bang toward the rear of the plane and a whoosh noise," one passenger told a local news station — and then "all of the masks dropped."
Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares more details from the BBC: Diego Murillo said the gap was "as wide as a refrigerator".
Fellow passenger Elizabeth Lee added: "Part of the plane was missing and the wind was just extremely loud. but everyone was in their seats and had their belt on."
Jessica Montoia described the flight as a "trip from hell" adding a phone was taken out of a man's hand by the wind.
CNN covers the federal response: The FAA said the planes must be parked until emergency inspections are performed, which will "take around four to eight hours per aircraft."
"The FAA is requiring immediate inspections of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes before they can return to flight," FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said Saturday in a statement. "Safety will continue to drive our decision-making as we assist the (National Transportation Safety Board's) investigation into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282." The order impacts 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets, the agency approximates....
Boeing said the company supported the FAA's grounding decision. "Safety is our top priority and we deeply regret the impact this event has had on our customers and their passengers," Boeing said in a statement
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader lsllll for sharing the news.
The plane "landed safely back at Portland International Airport with 171 guests and six crew members," the airline said... According to FlightAware, the flight was airborne for about 20 minutes.
"There was a really loud bang toward the rear of the plane and a whoosh noise," one passenger told a local news station — and then "all of the masks dropped."
Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares more details from the BBC: Diego Murillo said the gap was "as wide as a refrigerator".
Fellow passenger Elizabeth Lee added: "Part of the plane was missing and the wind was just extremely loud. but everyone was in their seats and had their belt on."
Jessica Montoia described the flight as a "trip from hell" adding a phone was taken out of a man's hand by the wind.
CNN covers the federal response: The FAA said the planes must be parked until emergency inspections are performed, which will "take around four to eight hours per aircraft."
"The FAA is requiring immediate inspections of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes before they can return to flight," FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said Saturday in a statement. "Safety will continue to drive our decision-making as we assist the (National Transportation Safety Board's) investigation into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282." The order impacts 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets, the agency approximates....
Boeing said the company supported the FAA's grounding decision. "Safety is our top priority and we deeply regret the impact this event has had on our customers and their passengers," Boeing said in a statement
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader lsllll for sharing the news.
Exemption (Score:5, Funny)
I bet Boeing wants an exemption from having to fix these crappy planes too
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Your forgot yet again.
If i can avoid it i wouldnt fly on a max
Too many issues
Re:Exemption (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, where's your spirit of adventure?
Quit being so negative. You could easily look at it this way - "one lucky passenger might win a free skydiving lesson!"
Re:Exemption (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, except Alaska Air would still charge extra for the parachute.
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Re: Exemption (Score:2)
How expensive is fitting another door versus a lifetime of more revenue from having additional sitting? Or does this airline normally fly with a lot of empty seats?
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It depends how Boeing is like Oracle I guess.
Re: Exemption (Score:3)
Re: Exemption (Score:2)
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There are other reasons to avoid Southwest, like their software running on what I can only assume is FoxPro which regularly melts down on holiday weekends and results in massive flight cancellations.
Re:Exemption (Score:5, Informative)
I bet Boeing wants an exemption from having to fix these crappy planes too
For those who might have missed it, Boeing wants an exemption [slashdot.org] from safety rules to get its Max 7 planes off the ground. It was a story from 24 hours ago.
Re:Exemption (Score:5, Informative)
For those who read with poor attention (like me on the first try), this is not a dupe. Max 7 != Max 9.
In general, any Max can be assumed to be not airworthy, and any approvals have been pushed due to political ties.
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Only reason the previous story was about the Max 7 and not the Max 9 is because the Max 9 is already exempted due to the time limit in the regulation - Boeing fucked up with the Max 7 development, pushing it beyond the cut off period and thus it falls under the regulation rather than automatically having an exemption.
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Just wait for the Max 10!
It will be the goat and fix everything... maybe.
Boeing needs to ground all of the "Max" series planes. They are dangerous. They were designed to skirt rules, without adequate testing and have already killed hundreds of people.
Re: Exemption (Score:2)
Re: Exemption (Score:2)
Yeah, this was what I immediately thought when I heard of this accident. Impeccable timing, I hope the FAA will not yield here. Boeing's argument was basically that "the part coming off hasn't yet happened so it won't". Well, the windows hadn't fallen off earlier either. There's a first time for everything.
This all sounds almost as if it was a bad thing to allow the company to self-monitor. Kind of like unregulated free market wouldn't be a silver bullet to humanity's problems. Who could've thunk.
Re:Exemption (Score:5, Informative)
It's too early to tell who is at fault here. This was a plug that is used in place of a door and is probably installed by the maintenance crews of the airlines. This could have been improper installation by the Alaskan Airline maintenance crew. Yeah, it's not good news for Boeing seeing how they have been in the limelight for a while but this could be an Alaskan Airlines mishap that was out of Boeing's hands.
Re:Exemption (Score:4, Interesting)
This was a plug that is used in place of a door
Take another look. Airplanes use a type of door called a "plug door" in the passenger cabin. The edges of the door and matching fuselage are slanted so that the door is bigger than the opening. The difference in air pressure forces the door into the opening, plugging it.
The door in question wasn't a "plug" it was a "plug door," the normal emergency door that goes there. Same as all the other emergency, not to mention the main cabin door. It was "deactivated" and covered with a plastic interior panel that offered no access.
The question is: how did a plug door escape the plug? It shouldn't be physically possible at altitude.
Re:Exemption (Score:5, Informative)
The question is: how did a plug door escape the plug? It shouldn't be physically possible at altitude.
Answer: "Plug door" is apparently now a marketing term [pprune.org]. These doors actually open outwards, hinged from the bottom. And although multiple safety mechanisms should prevent them from opening in flight, apparently that wasn't good enough, or perhaps whatever Boeing did when they replaced the latching mechanisms with permanent bolts isn't good enough.
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Sounds like crappy Boeing engineering. You know, business as usual for them.
Re:Exemption (Score:4, Informative)
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Boeing was run by engineers until 2019. So much for that.
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Re: Exemption (Score:3)
...one of the cabin windows/emergency exits and its holding panel
It sounds like not only the door, but the frame as well...
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Re:Exemption (Score:5, Interesting)
It's too early to tell who is at fault here
The company who poorly constructed the plane? Do you think the airline decided to save weight and removed a handful of fasteners?
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This was a brand new plane from Boeing. How bad could the maintenance crew be that they cause a catastrophic failure in 2 months. It's pretty obvious who's at fault here
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If this is the case then Boeing may be at fault here. An investigation should shed more light.
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With a history of bad screw-ups in the recent past, obviously Boeing should be assumed to be at fault until proven otherwise.
Re:Exemption (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it was just reported the other day:
https://www.seattletimes.com/b... [seattletimes.com]
The irony could not hit faster.
They used to be an engineering led company. Then they switched to become a "suits" led company, and we are seeing the results with literal human blood.
(For those who are interested, they bought a failing McDonnell Douglas, and used the genius idea to promote the execs that led to disaster at that company to take over at Boeing. Some even would call it a "reverse sale": https://qz.com/1776080/how-the... [qz.com], I would say one of the worst ideas in business, ever)
Re:Exemption (Score:5, Interesting)
I hesitate to write this, but I wonder if a company like Boeing, which is almost monopoly, needs much more regulation. Speaking as an engineer, I feel the govt. needs to step in and flip the political structure. Engineers should have all say. Most of us engineers want to make things better, not cheaper. Efficient is okay, frugal may be okay, but cross-checking, design review, many engineer signatures needed for qualification, design approval, and any change orders. Most engineers only cheapen things because of incentives, like keeping your job, and pressure from execs. Heck, the #1 thing I'm supposed to have on my resume: how I cheapened something.
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which is almost monopoly, needs much more regulation.
Not really. Nothing about competition drives a company to focus on engineering. It's cost cutting all the way down. The issue here is regulations already exist, but they are clearly inadequate. The issue is not that Boeing needs engineering leadership, it's that the FAA does. The existing regulations should be properly enforced and investigated by engineers. One thing that came out of the first MAX disaster was that the FAA basically trusted Boeing's reports on their planes and was largely taking a "self-ve
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It’s only a monopoly in the US. Out here in Europe, I sometimes fly Boeing, I sometimes fly Airbus, and I’ve recently flown planes of Canadian and other manufacture as well.
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Yeah..Europe isn't as superior as you think. The four fights I took in the U.S. last month were all on an Airbus.
Decline of Boeing (Score:2)
There was also public vicious contempt by top management for engineers.
People I know with contacts there say morale has never recovered.
Re:Exemption (Score:4, Insightful)
They used to be an engineering led company. Then they switched to become a "suits" led company, and we are seeing the results with literal human blood.
Not the first time a tech company goes to shit when the "suits" take over. In fact, at this time, it is pretty much an expected long-term outcome. Greed, arrogance, massive inflated sense of self-worth, small actual skills and insight, all very common in "suits" and all things that good engineering education prevents or rather throws out of the student body to land on the trash-heap of "unsuitable".
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The other question, is there a revolving door between Boeing and the FAA? Like how there is in other "heavily regulated" industries.
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They'll probably also pay the TikTok user to delete the video.
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I saw it on reddit shortly after it happened. Easy to download.
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As "fixing" the 737 means a complete redesign, yes, they will. Boeing cannot really design new airplanes anymore. They lost that capability some time in the last two decades because they stopped doing it.
Dirty secret of high-complexity engineering: If you do not do it regularly, you stop being able to. Too much stuff that cannot be documented and resides in the heads of people. Reacquiring these skills is hugely expensive and takes decades to do. Maybe Boeing could ask Airbus to design them a new plane thou
Loose Screw Screw Ups in Boeing (Score:2)
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It wasn't a window it was a "blind door" that was on a position that's intended to have an actual emergency door on planes that takes over a certain number of passengers.
OK, a bit nitpicking, but the "blind door" should have the same securing as an actual emergency door, so the question is more about why the design even permitted said item to be blown off through cabin pressure. A proper design should just make it seal against the fuselage by the cabin pressure.
Re: Loose Screw Screw Ups in Boeing (Score:2)
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Yes, but it's a lot of focused stress. A normal door would have really good frame that would spread the forces. I'm purely speculating and guessing, but my first thought is metal fatigue. That said, someone said this was a brand new plane. So maybe the plug attachment is a hack, not fully engineered and approved. Despite the 737 MAX deaths, Boeing just refuses to do things right:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-wants-faa-to-exempt-max-7-from-safety-rules-to-get-it-in-the-air/ [seattletimes.com]
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OK, a bit nitpicking, but the "blind door" should have the same securing as an actual emergency door, so the question is more about why the design even permitted said item to be blown off through cabin pressure. A proper design should just make it seal against the fuselage by the cabin pressure.
No, it was a "removed" door and thus should have no securing as no door mechanisms like hinges should be there. The crew should not have to secure it as there is nothing for them to secure. There will be an investigation as what went wrong when it was installed at the factory.
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Not crew securing, design securing. If the door was properly designed it should have been larger than the hole in the fuselage and therefore just self seal if it wasn't installed properly.
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A blank panel could be mounted so that it's seating against the fuselage if it's mounted from the inside.
Same with the door frame for the emergency door - if it's seating against the fuselage from the inside then there's no way it could blow out.
If you screw in the door or blank panel from the outside then you have a solution that is inherently prone to this if the screws and mounting brackets are improperly applied.
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A blank panel could be mounted so that it's seating against the fuselage if it's mounted from the inside.
What are you talking about? No design of airplane would mount a panel so that it is sticking out of a fuselage. Such a mounting would be obvious to Alaska and their personnel. You do know that airlines inspect planes when they receive them, right? You do know that pilots inspect the plane before each flight?
Same with the door frame for the emergency door - if it's seating against the fuselage from the inside then there's no way it could blow out.
Again, what are you talking about? You know that these door frames are not bolted onto the air frame, right? This is not a house.
If you screw in the door or blank panel from the outside then you have a solution that is inherently prone to this if the screws and mounting brackets are improperly applied.
Again, WTF are you talking about? This is an airplane not a house. You do
171 guests (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a window, but a door... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not a window, but a door... (Score:5, Informative)
So to get ahead of the inevitable question, no, this could not have been a passenger event as there is no accessible handle inside the plane, not to mention according to witnesses on the plan no one was sitting there anyway.
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It wasn't even a real door, just a blind plug instead of an actual door. But the mounting points for it should likely be the same as for the actual emergency door.
The fact that it happened raises more questions though about the design of the fuselage and the door installation.
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Also reported the only passenger to book a seat on that row didn't make the f
Re:Not a window, but a door... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's my understanding that it's the same plug as used on the 737-900ER (the predecessor to the MAX9). So the design is 20(ish) years old. Which is part of what makes this so unusual.
Re: Not a window, but a door... (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s not necessarily unusual. After all, Ariane V used software that had been in use for years, and blew up as a result of it. The circumstances in which a design is used matter.
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That is not really comparable. Have you read the Ariane V accident report?
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That's not remotely the same. The problem with Ariane V's software was integration in other software with poorly handled data integrity. There is almost no mechanical equivalent here. The door is self contained, the Ariane V's software was not. The former is not related to circumstances of the design, the latter is.
You can think of this in the same way as a physical door in your house. It doesn't matter how tall your ceilings are, it doesn't matter if your walls are drywall or stone. It doesn't matter if yo
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Probably some corners cut (again) on the orders of greedy and incompetent Boeing "management".
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So to get ahead of the inevitable question, no, this could not have been a passenger event as there is no accessible handle inside the plane, not to mention according to witnesses on the plan no one was sitting there anyway.
Interesting. It clearly was a door from the outside. Did not notice if was covered up on the inside. So they cannot shift blame to passengers, which they would doubtlessly have tried to do otherwise.
problem after problem for the max (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL
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"Safety is our top priority " LOL
Came to say exactly this, along with pointing out that "we deeply regret the impact" lie.
Every public statement made by every corporate representative in this kind of situation spits out the same hollow, meaningless, bullshit lines. Who among the public believes this crap?
The mouthpieces would be better off saying simply "we're sorry, and we'll make sure it doesn't happen again" - at least people might then be inclined to liste. But no - heaven forbid some wonk might actually commit to doing a better job.
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Who among the public believes this crap?
Far too many people. The "Big Lie" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) technique is alive and well and not only in marketing and PR.
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Hahaha, read that about their security before looking at the online banking solution of a large bank about 10 years ago. Then proceeded to find that an iPhone with a self-signed cert would nicely work as an SSL-Breaker proxy for that online banking application. We even sent an actual bank transfer through it and saw everything including password, PIN and amount and the stransfer (which was to a friend in another country I never before had sent money to, so typical fraud situation) went through without a hit
Re:problem after problem for the max (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:problem after problem for the max (Score:5, Informative)
Safety exemptions for an airplane that has already caused disasters because corners were cut. https://www.forbes.com/sites/i... [forbes.com]
Boeing employees were saying they wouldn't their families fly on that particular design.
In one exchange between two employees in February 2018, a staffer asked: “Would you put your family on a MAX simulated trained aircraft? I wouldn't.” Another wrote in April 2017: “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” in reference to issues with plane equipment.
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>
At some point we need to put safety in second place or nothing would get done, because doing nothing is always safer than doing something.
Yeah, fuck fire codes while we're at it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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You are quite wrong. Safety comes with thresholds. As soon as a threshold is exceeded, you _must_ stop delivering the product and fix it, because if you actually deliver it, it will likely have huge negative value for the customer and probably for you.
It is however no surprise that _you_ do not understand safety engineering at all.
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Commercial aviation is not an experimental technology where safety takes a backseat to pushing the edge. Commercial aviation should be focused on safety first. So should cars. And trains. But not skydivers or astronauts. But they are willingly taking those risks so they can have "safety third".
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As I commented above, just the day before, Boeing:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-wants-faa-to-exempt-max-7-from-safety-rules-to-get-it-in-the-air/ [seattletimes.com]
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Untrue. The MAX 8 catastrophe was pretty much cooked on-shore. It was not simply bad engineering, it was bad engineering enforced by management and those decisions were very much on-shore and by US "experts". Your attempts to put blame "some other place than the US" are as inaccurate as they are lacking in sophistication.
It was door plug, not window (Score:2)
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Indeed. It definitely was a door (emergency exit) and these are known weak points an get special attention in any sane design and manufacturing process because something like this MUST NOT HAPPEN.
We will probably get some detailed technical explanation that serves to obscure that Boeing "management" cut corners and forced cheaper-than-possible engineering yet again because of sheer greed and incompetence.
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I wonder whether they are used for cheating at chess!
Not all 737 MAX 9s (Score:2)
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It's not all 737 MAX 9s, its only one particular configuration - a couple of hundred aircraft.
It's pretty close to all of the MAX 9s. A total of 218 MAX 9s [seattletimes.com] have been delivered worldwide, and out of those, 171 are grounded. That's over 78%.
The plugged configuration is probably the only configuration used by U.S. carriers, because they tend to provide somewhat more legroom in coach than some overseas carriers, and thus don't need the extra exit door. So I suspect that this grounding represents ~100% of the MAX 9s owned by U.S. carriers, and possibly all of the MAX 9s that ever fly into or out of th
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Indeed. But observe how somebody clueless tries to absolve the manufacturer that so obviously has screwed up badly yet again.
At the current state-of-the-art in avionics engineering something like this (or something like the max-8 catastrophe) must not happen. 30 years ago? Yes. Kinks were still be worked out back then. Toady? No. If it happens, there is something fundamentally (and probably unfixable because it is a deep organizational failure) wrong with the process that created that plane.
Re:Not all 737 MAX 9s (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. But observe how somebody clueless tries to absolve the manufacturer that so obviously has screwed up badly yet again.
At the current state-of-the-art in avionics engineering something like this (or something like the max-8 catastrophe) must not happen. 30 years ago? Yes. Kinks were still be worked out back then. Toady? No. If it happens, there is something fundamentally (and probably unfixable because it is a deep organizational failure) wrong with the process that created that plane.
Agreed, and more to the point, there is something badly wrong with the company that created that plane.
The MAX 8 was a textbook example of how not to engineer an aircraft. I can't believe those things are back in the air, given how thoroughly Boeing failed to follow modern standards of having multiple sources for every piece of data and multiple computers processing every piece of data. That hardware should absolutely have never shipped, and there should have been a whole lot of criminal charges back then. I'm scared to fly in the MAX series. I don't trust them at all, and nothing short of having a team of engineers from one of their competitors go through every single system with a fine-toothed comb looking for design mistakes is going to convince me that they are airworthy.
I don't know whether this latest mess was a design mistake or a manufacturing mistake, but ultimately, it doesn't matter. Something like this happening during a period when they should have been double checking every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' is prima facie proof that Boeing's safety culture is too fundamentally broken, and that their company simply can no longer be trusted with passenger safety. Boeing had a responsibility to make sure these planes were safe, and they failed. Again.
I find it even more appalling that Boeing is asking for special exemptions to get the 737 MAX 7 up in the air because they screwed up the design on that one, too. The idea of the government granting the MAX 7 exception should have resulted in derisive laughter by the FAA a week ago. But now, after a brand new MAX 9 blew a permanently sealed door mid-flight, it should be met with shocked stares. If that gets approved, I'm declaring the FAA hopelessly corrupt to the point of being useless, because Boeing should absolutely not be cut the tiniest bit of slack at this point. Frankly, in any sane universe, Boeing should be lucky if the FAA allows any future Boeing designs into the air at all after this.
And it's time to stop deferring those criminal charges from the MAX 8. Let Boeing self destruct. It will be better for everyone if that company ceases to exist. Maybe they'll spin off a new company without any of the McDonnell-Douglas management and go back to being Boeing again, but short of that happening, IMO, the only rational thing for Boeing's execs to do is to file Chapter 7, liquidate the company's assets, and give the resulting money back to the shareholders. Short of pity contracts from the Department of Defense, I can't imagine anybody in their right minds buying a Boeing aircraft at this point. Three strikes and you're out.
Not like the stockholders should care, either. The company's ongoing operations are basically worthless. By my math, they have around $221 per share in assets, and the stock is selling for $249.00 per share — just a 12.6% premium over the value of their assets. In effect, the stock market is saying that the company continuing to do business has approximately zero financial value going forwards.
Just put Boeing out of its misery already. IMO, the McDonnell-Douglas bean counter management has run Boeing into the ground [qz.com] just like they ran their previous company into the ground, and continuing to allow them to be in charge of a company that builds aircraft is not in the world's best interests.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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If it's Boeing, I'm not going!
I always thought Boeing was the sound it makes when it hits the ground, but maybe that's just the MAX 8. :-D
Boeing is a genital wart of a corporation. (Score:2)
DOD and airlines should require an engineer as CEO (Score:2)
Plus dump DEI. Hire and promote solely on merit.
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Indeed. Non-engineers basically universally run engineering companies into the ground, because they do not know where to not cut corners, where to invest long-term and they cannot understand what engineering experts tell them. It is a slow progress, but as soon as an engineering company gets non-engineer "leadership" and upper management, it is done for. A very striking example is HP: As long as they promoted on merit and made sure all management (except specialist roles like legal) came from engineering, t
As wide as a refrigerator? (Score:2)
I'll bet it was a "Frigid Air"
As Wide As jokes aside, how wide was it in furlongs per fortnight?
First, it clearly was a door (Score:2)
Second, that is even worse, because they are known to be weak spots and get special attention in any good design so that something like this never happens. Well, crappy Boeing engineering at work. Another has-been that cannot be fixed. I bet Airbus fetched a crate of something really good from their basement to toast this event.
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I doubt it was an engineering problem. It most likely was an assembly problem. It blew out at a fairly low altitude of 16,000 ft. Boeing uses millions of subcontractors, partially to keep Congress happy.
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Airbus may be distracted by thinking about how it was that their plane burnt to a total crisp the other day in Tokyo.
Just compare Starliner to Crew Dragon (Score:2)
Disasters aside, I think one of the most demoralizing moments in Boeing history was probably the first time they saw photos of Starliner's interior next to Crew Dragon's & realized their flagship product of the 21st century looked like a Soviet vacuum cleaner next to a Dyson.
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not a window (Score:2)
Many outlets made this same wrong claim, because no one bothers to check anything. It was not a window. It was a plug for a space that can be used for an additional emergency exit. The entire plug blew out. The plug had a window in it.
Technical explanation of MAX 9 door options (Score:2)
Long, but thorough explanation of the mid-cabin door options:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Previous Flights had pressurization problems (Score:3)
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They'll fire the guy who swept up the shop, give the execs bonuses and pat each other on the back for a job well done.
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Yep. The dirty secret here is that the US military needs Boeing. Otherwise they would have gone bankrupt at the Max 8 catastrophe or before. Hence they will, again, be handled with kid-gloves and given a chance (again) to "do better" (or not).
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Maintenance? We need no stinking maintenance to make the mistakes! These days we screw up the design directly!