The door plug of an airplane panel that blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight has been found, a part that could potentially help with the investigations into the cause of the accident, US aviation authorities said on Sunday.
US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy said that a teacher, identified only as “Bob,” found the panel in his backyard in Portland, Oregon.
“I am excited to announce we have found the door plug,” Homendy told a news briefing.
Photo: National Transportation Safety Board / handout via Reuters
“We are really pleased that Bob found this,” she added. “He took a picture. I can just see the outside of the door plug from the pictures, the white portions. We can’t see anything else, but we’re going to go pick that up and make sure that we begin analyzing it.”
Investigators are to examine the plug, which is 66cm by 121cm and weighs 28.5kg, for signs of how it broke free.
The jetliner was not being used for flights to Hawaii after a warning light that could have indicated a pressurization problem lit up on three different flights, Homendy said.
Alaska Airlines restricted the aircraft from long flights over water so the plane “could return very quickly to an airport” if the warning light reappeared, she said.
Homendy cautioned that the pressurization light might be unrelated to Friday’s incident in which the plug covering an unused exit door blew off the Boeing 737 Max 9 as it cruised about 4.8km over Oregon.
The warning light came on during three previous flights: on Dec. 7, Wednesday and Thursday — the day before the door plug broke off.
Homendy said she did not have all the details regarding the Dec. 7 incident, but specified the light came on during flights last week after the plane had landed.
Investigators would not have the benefit of hearing what was going on in the cockpit during the flight, as the cockpit voice recorder — one of two so-called black boxes — recorded over the flight’s sounds after two hours, Homendy said.
Hours after the incident, the FAA ordered the grounding of 171 of the 218 Max 9s in operation, including all those used by Alaska Airlines and United Airlines, until they can be inspected.
The airlines on Sunday said they were still waiting for details about how to do the inspections.
Without some of their planes, cancelations began to mount at the two carriers.
Alaska said it canceled 170 flights — more than one-fifth of its schedule — by mid-afternoon on the West Coast because of the groundings, while United had scrapped about 180 flights, while salvaging others by finding different planes.
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