THE missing door of Alaska Airlines, Boeing 737 Max 9, which was detached from the plane mid-air on Friday (Jan 5), was found on at a teacher’s back yard. Nearly, 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes have been grounded as safety checks continue. In a press conference, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy spoke about the status of the investigation and said, “I’m excited to announce that we found the door plug.” Revealing the identification of the resident who shared two photos of the item to the NTSB as a school teacher named ‘Bob’, she said, “Thank you, Bob.”
“We’re going to go pick that up and make sure that we begin analyzing it,” Homendy added.
As the first day of NTSB’s investigation ended, the chairperson of the agency indicated that some factors were complicating the investigation. She said that the record of the event in the plane’s cockpit voice recorder was inadvertently taped over and they had not found the door plug. “That is unfortunately a loss for us,” said Homendy in the press conference held on Sunday night (Jan 7). “That is a loss for safety,” she added.
Homendy, during the press conference supported the expansion of the minimum time recorded from two hours to 25 hours on the devices. Such a time span is more likely to save the cockpit voice data in case such an accident occurs.
She said that the device from the flight – in which the door had blown off – automatically recorded the pertinent voice data since someone had not been able to power it down. The device started a fresh recording while wiping out the last one in the next two hours. “The circuit breaker was not pulled,” said Homendy. Speaking about the communication issues and chaos on board the Boeing 737 Max 9, she said that the flight crew reported hearing a loud noise and the cabin depressurised rapidly as the door blew out.
“They heard a bang,” Homendy said. The first officer of the plane lost her headset in the depressurisation, and the captain also faced headset problems, said Homendy. She said that they turned on a speaker for communications.
“Communication was a serious issue,” said Homendy. Speaking further the chair said that, at the same time, the cockpit door also violently opened and a laminated emergency checklist which is used by the pilots in such a situation flew out. “It did blow open during the explosive decompression,” said Homendy, regarding the cockpit door.
