Alaska
Is air travel really the safest mode of transportation?
Last week, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing in Portland, the United States, when a cabin panel blew off in midair leaving a gaping hole in the aircraft’s fuselage. Just days before, a Japan Airways Airbus collided with a smaller coastguard plane, resulting in the Airbus catching fire.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered an inquiry into the incident and several passengers filed a class action lawsuit against Boeing in Washington state on Thursday.
So, is it really safe to travel by air? Here is what we know about the Alaska Airlines incident and the general safety of aviation:
What happened to the Alaska Airlines flight?
On January 5, just moments after takeoff, a cabin door panel blew off in midair during an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland to Ontario, leaving one side of the aircraft’s body with a gaping hole, reducing cabin pressure and prompting an emergency landing. The blown-out door panel was later discovered by a Portland teacher, in his garden.
Federal officials in the US ordered the temporary grounding of all Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners until they can be inspected.
The cabin panel that flew out was a “door plug” installed over an extra emergency exit door, which had been removed.
Thankfully, no one was seated next to the gaping hole. Additionally, the plane was only 16,000 feet (4,876 metres) above the ground. Planes typically fly more than 31,000 feet (9,448 metres) when they are at their highest. Had the aircraft been much higher, the pressure difference could have become large enough to suck passengers out of the aircraft, former FAA accident investigator Jeff Guzzetti told The Washington Post.
The aircraft, which had departed from Oregon and was heading for California, landed safely in Portland with all 174 passengers and six crew members mostly unharmed. Some passengers sustained minor injuries.
The aircraft is a new Boeing 737 Max 9 which had been delivered to Alaska Airlines in late October and certified as safe by the FAA in early November. It had been in service for just eight weeks.
London-based independent aviation expert John Strickland told Al Jazeera that the panel which flew off is supposed to be a secure part of the aircraft’s structure. “That’s why it’s more surprising and a matter of concern that this blowout happened,” he said.
London-based aviation analyst and consultant Alex Macheras agreed: “This should not be downplayed, that’s for sure. Because in modern commercial aviation, we do not see sections of an aircraft body, of fuselage, becoming separated from the rest of the aircraft, certainly not mid-flight.”
Has Boeing taken responsibility?
As more than 170 planes remained grounded last week, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun acknowledged errors made by Boeing and provided reassurance. He told staff that the company would ensure an incident like the Alaska Airlines blowout could never happen again. It has not been confirmed what the actual fault in the aircraft was, although experts told Al Jazeera it is most likely down to a manufacturing flaw rather than a design flaw. There has also been speculation about parts coming loose after both Alaska Airlines and United Airlines reported incidents of needing to tighten loose hardware last Monday.
Earlier, the US chief accident investigator, The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said it had received reports that warning lights had been triggered on brand-new Boeing 737 Max 9 crafts on three flights. Two of these alerts happened on consecutive days before the Alaska Airlines blowout.
Richard Aboulafia, aviation industry analyst and managing director of Washington-based AeroDynamic Advisory, told Al Jazeera that the warning lights were likely the result of a technical glitch. “They ignored it because, strangely, the pressure differential came on while it was on the ground, which means it was a glitch. There’s no pressure differential while you’re on the ground,” he explained. The cabin pressure can only vary when the aircraft is in the air, which is why it was acceptable to ignore the warning and fly the plane over land, he said.
The company stopped flying the aircraft over the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii due to the warnings, yet kept it flying over land, the NTSB said.
Who checks the safety of an aircraft?
Aboulafia explained that the FAA typically certifies an aircraft, approving its operations and production.
However, since the Boeing 737 Max has had safety issues before, the FAA announced that it would inspect every single aircraft in the Max series under these unusual circumstances. The details about the exact checks that were carried out are not public.
Once the aircraft is in use by an airline, regular maintenance checks called A, B, C and D checks are carried out, Aboulafia explained. While an A check is typically a cursory investigation of a plane’s moving parts, exterior wear and tear and of oil and fuel, a D-check is rigorous and involves a teardown and detailed inspection of the aircraft.
These checks are carried out at dedicated intervals based on the number of years an aircraft has been in service or its number of flight hours. Some airlines have their own in-house capabilities to carry out these checks and while many airlines are able to do A or B checks, only certain airlines are able to do C or D checks themselves. Others use third-party services.
“This is an unprecedented production ramp and, clearly, there needs to be more resources provided for it, whether it’s at the manufacturing level or the inspections level,” Aboulafia added, referring to how aeroplanes are now manufactured in large numbers. He called for a greater number of people to be assigned more time for inspections.
Aboulafia added that it is imperative to identify where and how the Alaska aircraft passed its safety checks, and whether it was Boeing, Spirit Aerosystems or the FAA that cleared the jetliner without detailed inspection. There is no information about the level of detail of inspection that took place before the plane was cleared for flying.
At some or at multiple stages in the process, there needed to be more time allowed for workers or inspectors to “do their job”, however, Aboulafia said, adding: “We don’t know yet, but clearly, there was a gap in how things should have been done.”
Have Boeing 737 aircraft had problems before?
Yes. The jets were grounded worldwide for about two years after a crash killed 189 people in Indonesia in October 2018 and another killed 157 in Ethiopia five months later.
In both instances, a design flaw was found in the automated flight control software, which activated erroneously. Boeing 737s were cleared to fly again once the aircraft had been revamped with an improved flight control system.
Aboulafia said the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia had been caused by design defects in the flight control system, while the recent incident was a defect in manufacturing, with loose hardware on aircraft, however.
United Airlines and Alaska Airlines have both reported loose hardware that needed additional tightening on multiple grounded Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft on Monday, raising new concerns among industry experts about the manufacturing process.
If a design issue occurs, the design defect must be fixed on the aircraft before the plane model is cleared to fly again, he explained.
For manufacturing defects, “you have to identify where the mistakes were made, and then it’s an easy inspection, especially since it’s structural rather than software or anything like that”, he added.
Why is turbulence on the rise?
A June 2023 study by the UK’s Reading University showed that severe air turbulence had increased by 55 percent at an average point over the North Atlantic between 1979 and 2020.
The study concluded that turbulence will become worse with climate change, and the calculated rise is consistent with the expected effects of changes in climate. Hence, the rise in turbulence is not due to poor design or the manufacturing of aircraft.
Is air travel still the safest mode of transportation?
Harvard University research has found that the odds of being in a plane crash are one in 1.2 million, while the odds of dying in such a crash are one in 11 million. Meanwhile, the odds of dying in a car accident are significantly higher at one in 5,000.
“Is any form of transport always safe? No, but if you choose not to fly and instead take a car, that’s a far more dangerous way of travelling,” said Aboulafia.
Alaska
Alaska sports notebook: Allie Ostrander finishes 4th at U.S. 6K Championships, Daishen Nix maximizes minutes in NBA Summer League action
In the town where NFL Hall of Famers are immortalized each year, Kenai’s Allie Ostrander added to her own illustrious resume over the weekend by coming in fourth place at the U.S. 6K Championships in Canton, Ohio, on Saturday. The Alaska Sports and High School Sports Hall of Famer clocked in at 18 minutes, 20 seconds, which was just 12 seconds behind the top finisher and her former college teammate at Boise State, Emily Venters of Utah.
“Nothing more fun than ripping sub-5 miles down the streets of Ohio and reaching my max heart rate with over a mile to go,” Ostrander said in an Instagram post. “I felt strong and am excited about the trajectory I’ve been on this year.”
Anchorage’s Daishen Nix made his 2026 NBA Summer League debut over the weekend for the Houston Rockets and reached double figures in both minutes played and points scored in the two games he appeared. On Friday, in a 97-86 win over the Denver Nuggets, he came off the bench and logged 10 points in 25 minutes. The next day, in a 102-89 loss to the Toronto Raptors, he played one less minute but tied for the third-most points on the team with 16, which included knocking down a trio of 3-pointers.
Anchorage basketball player Isaiah Moses recorded his fourth and fifth straight games of double figures in scoring and helped propel the Perry Lakes Hawks in back-to-back wins last week in the NBL1 Australia. In a 110-88 triumph over the Rockingham Flames on Thursday, he recorded 11 points and four assists. The former Dimond star and Gatorade Player of the Year logged 20-plus points for the fourth time in his last five games with 26 points in a 104-75 win over the Goldfields Giants on Saturday. Moses went 6-of-10 from behind the arc and nearly had a double-double with nine assists.
Anchorage’s Coen Niclai recorded his team-leading fourth home run of the season for the Wareham Gatemen in the Cape Cod summer baseball league this past Thursday. In the top of the fourth inning in a 4-2 loss to the Chatham Anglers, the two-time Alaska Gatorade Player of the Year and recent Oregon State University commit sent a fly ball soaring out of the park over right center field.
Juneau’s Hunter Carte entered elite company Saturday when he led the Auke Bay Post 25 Alaska Legion baseball team to a 10-0 victory over visiting East. The recent graduate, who helped lead the Crimson Bears to a 2026 high school state title, recorded the first no-hitter in Legion baseball in two years and the seventh since the league adopted the pitch count in 2018. With the win, the team extended its six-game winning streak and remains atop the league standings as the regular season nears a close.
No one envies the Alaska Legislature being called back into a second special session on the proposed liquefied natural gas pipeline. One wonders if legislators are being held hostage to the governor’s predetermined decision. While the benefits of an LNG project are easily imagined, the economic risks of the Alaska LNG project must not be ignored.
Alaskans are not assured that Glenfarne, the company that was granted 75% of this project in an undisclosed document, won’t just flip it — sell it — to another entity after it gains billions of dollars in concessions from Alaska. Why the sudden change by Glenfarne and the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation from saying no legislative action was needed to the recent assertion that billions of dollars in property tax reductions are now necessary? It is without question that local municipalities will collectively incur hundreds of millions of dollars in direct impact costs.
Will Alaska give away another resource “farm” again? How would Alaska respond if the LNG project stalls and our resource continues to be a stranded asset? No purchaser has signed on the dotted line to actually buy fixed quantities of our gas. Are prospective purchasers interested? Yes. Have they signed binding contracts? No.
Russia has natural gas pipelines flowing into China. Russia has substantial volume to sell, having lost its natural gas sales to Europe after invading Ukraine. China currently produces 60% of its oil and natural gas needs by fracking its resources in western China. What would keep the Chinese from selling their or Russian natural gas to Alaska’s potential customers in Asia?
Natural gas prices have remained steady, which says there is plenty of it. Can Alaska’s project, including costly export facilities, be built at a cost that allows it to compete?
Legislators, please respond. But don’t sell out the interests of Alaskans. Glenfarne’s and AGDC’s lack of truthful answers raises many red flags. The correct decision is to let Glenfarne pay for its project. If it can’t or won’t, it isn’t economic.
Patrice Lee is a 49 year resident of Alaska, a retired math and science teacher, and a former elected member of the Interior Gas Utility Board of Directors. She lives in Fairbanks.
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The intense marine heat wave conditions that began roiling the Bering Sea in about 2016 resulted in the lowest winter sea ice extent measured in 150 years, widespread bird and marine mammal die-offs, a drastic shift in fish populations and a crash of snow crab stocks.
Now new research is tying the marine heat wave to the recent collapse of Yukon River chinook salmon.
A study published in April, written by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center and University of Alaska Fairbanks, showed the correlation between the extreme heat wave conditions and the nosedive in Yukon River chinook stocks. The heat wave was accompanied by a dramatic increase in deaths of older juvenile and adult chinook that, had they survived, would have returned from the ocean to freshwater spawning grounds, the study found.
The study was published in the journal Ecological Applications.
The Yukon River’s runs of chinook, also called king salmon, have been in a long-term decline since their past heyday, when they numbered in the hundreds of thousands and the river was one of the biggest sources of that salmon species.
The sharp downturn in recent years resulted in a 2022 return that was the lowest on record. Widespread fishery closures have been in effect for years along the Yukon River system in both Alaska and Canada.
The study evaluated four general reasons for the sharp decline: poor juvenile “recruitment” into the ocean, which refers to the successful migration of surviving juvenile fish from freshwater; deaths of fish in the marine environment at the start of their migration back to freshwater; harvests that target the salmon; and bycatch, the unintentional harvest of salmon by commercial fishing vessels targeting other species, such as pollock.
Poor juvenile recruitment emerged as an important factor, which was to be expected, the study said.
“Not surprisingly, we found evidence to suggest that impacts operating in the early life stages have likely contributed to declines in run sizes over the past two decades, which is consistent with previous research,” NOAA Fisheries researcher Lukas DeFilippo, the lead author, said in a statement.
But the information about spiking mortality among adults and older juveniles was new, the NOAA scientists said. That new trend represents “an apparent shift in the critical life history stages and processes” for Yukon River chinook, and a potential bottleneck limiting population recovery, the study said.
Exactly how the heat wave conditions caused deaths of salmon at sea is yet to be determined, the study said. It listed several factors that could have worked in combination, including lack of suitable prey, infections by the parasite Ichthyophonus and other diseases, as well as increased energy demands brought on by warmer temperatures.
Harvests, either intentional or as bycatch, did not emerge as important factors in the recent Yukon chinook declines, the study found.
The study contained some warnings.
Even though the marine heat wave conditions have eased, the abundance of prey that salmon need in the ocean has not returned to normal, it noted. And mortality rates in those later life stages continue to be higher than they were prior to the latest heat wave.
And the heat problems for older salmon are likely to become more common in years to come, the study said.
“Given that marine heatwaves are expected to become more frequent and severe with continued warming . . . similar rises in mortality—and concomitant limitation of productivity and recovery potential—as described here could become increasingly common in the future,” the study said.
An earlier study by NOAA Fisheries and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game tied successive heatwaves in both the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska to sharp declines in chum salmon stocks. That 2023 study also pointed to higher mortality out in the ocean.
Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.
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