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.
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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.
(Al Jazeera)
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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
A Portland resident found the blown-out door plug from Alaska Air Flight 1282 in his garden [Handout/NTSB via Reuters]
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.
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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.
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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.
University of Alaska graduate student workers protest in support of a contract in Fairbanks on Monday, April 29, 2024. (Photo provided by Alaska Graduate Workers Association)
The University of Alaska and the Alaska Graduate Workers Association have reached an agreement on a labor contract that would last from July through the end of 2026, the university said Tuesday.
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The university described the pact as a “tentative initial agreement” that must go through more steps. The agreement must be approved by the university Board of Regents and the state Department of Administration, as well as be ratified by the union. The university plans to submit the request for the Legislature to fund it before the end of the legislative session, scheduled to happen by May 15.
UA President Pat Pitney said the university administration’s goal throughout negotiations was to support “fair compensation increases” for graduate students with a contract that was financially sustainable.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the hard work put in over the last several days that allowed us to reach an agreement,” Pitney said in the prepared statement announcing the agreement. “We look forward to submitting it for legislative consideration this session.”
Union bargaining committee member Abigail Schiffmiller said Tuesday evening that the union aims to ratify the agreement within 24 hours to allow time for the Legislature to fund it.
Schiffmiller, a Ph.D. student and research assistant in biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said the agreement addresses all of the critical issues raised by union members. They include increasing pay, allowing bargaining over health insurance in the future, and requiring that if employees lose their jobs, the university must prove there was a just cause. It also allows the union to file grievances over discrimination and sexual harassment. And she said it would help both the university — by allowing students who had been under financial pressure to focus on research — as well as the state, by making the university more competitive in attracting grad students to Alaska, who may stay after they graduate.
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The graduate student workers voted to unionize in October and marched in protest Monday to increase pressure for a contract. On Friday, a Fairbanks Superior Court judge issued a temporary restraining sought by the university that blocked the students from striking.
The university said it took 96 days of negotiations to reach an agreement, in contrast with a national average of 465 days for a union’s first contract agreement.
The terms of the agreement include increasing minimum pay for master’s degree students by 14%, to $24.50 per hour, and by 17% for Ph.D. students, to $29 hourly, according to the university statement.
The terms include fee waivers for union members, and up to three weeks of unpaid family leave and 20 hours of scheduled leave per semester. The agreement also includes grievance procedures and continued health insurance coverage, as well as union input on future insurance changes. The cost of insurance is set to increase by $400,000, to be covered by the university, according to the statement.
The three universities in the statewide system have a total of 23 Ph.D. programs, more than 60 master’s programs, as well as graduate certificate programs.
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Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.
The Biden-Harris Administration’s Department of Energy Tuesday announced it has awarded more than $20 million to Alaskan communities for rural and remote clean energy projects. The six projects selected as part of the Energy Improvement in Rural and Remote Areas (ERA) grant program aim to cut energy costs, enhance climate resiliency, and support local economic development:
TanacrossSolar PV and Tok Battery Energy Storace System (Native Villages of Tanacross and Tok, Alaska): $5 million grant to install 1.5MW of solar PV on the grid at the Alaska Power & Telephone power plant paired with a 1.5MHw battery energy storage system that is expected to displace more than 12,500 gallons of expensive diesel fuel each year.
Big Battery as our Backbone (Kokhanok Village, Alaska): $5 million grant to upgrade the Kokhanok microgrid with a 943kWh battery energy storage system and solar, PV, wind turbine and electric thermal storage heating units, significantly increasing the microgrid’s reliability and resilience.
New Stuyahok Solar-Battery (New Stuyahok, Alaska): $4.3 million grant to construct a 500kW solar PV array, a 540kWh battery energy storage system, and a microgrid controller – leveraging abundant summer daylight hours to displace nearly a quarter of fuel consumption for rural Yup’ik villages in the remote Dillingham region.
Decarbonizing the Tongass with Tribally Owned Heat Pumps (Prince of Wales Island, Alaska): $2.5 million grant for a tribally owned project to install air-source heat pumps in up to 240 tribal buildings – powered by existing clean hydroelectric resources – to help reduce residents’ energy reliance on and emissions from fossil fuel use.
High Penetration Solar-Battery Project (Ambler, Alaska): $2.1 million grant to upgrade an existing power plant to allow for a 400kW solar PV system and a 500kWh battery energy storage system to produce nearly a quarter of the community’s electricity and allowing the village’s diesel generators to be turned off for the first time in more than 40 years.
Ouzinkie Independent Power Energy Improvement Project (Spruce Island, Alaska): $1.7 million grant to construct a 160kW solar PV and 210kWh battery energy storage system for a new microgrid offering back-up power during severe weather outages and reducing electricity costs by 10% for this community of 128 indigenous residents.
Nineteen projects across 12 states and 13 Tribal nations and communities were selected for this round of ERA grant funding. Further details on the $78 million awarded is in the press release below, and you can find specific project details on the OCED website.
JUNEAU, Alaska (KTUU) – Alaskans on Tuesday reacted to reports from multiple sources that the Biden Administration intends to reclassify regulation of cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III, altering its categorization to match drugs considered to be less dangerous. Schedule I is the most strict, and includes drugs such as heroin and LSD. Schedule III, where cannabis is expected to soon move, includes Tylenol with codeine and anabolic steroids.
Additionally, Schedule I is a category for drugs considered to have no medical use and a high potential for abuse, whereas Schedule III is classified as having moderate to low potential for dependence, and can be used for medicinal purposes.
Attorney Jana Weltzin – who is a board member with the Alaska Marijuana Industry Association – said the potential move by the federal government would be a huge benefit for businesses, because they would no longer be treated like “drug traffickers.” She also said such a change to reschedule the drug would be a relief for many businesses, in the event that they could deduct business expenses when filing taxes.
“That’s a very helpful thing,” she said. “We go from having all this phantom income, because there are all these expenses that you have to attribute to your net income and pay taxes on. To be able to capture those regular business expenses and be able to deduct them, like a normal business, that really helps. There’s nothing about this rescheduling that hurts so far, nothing that hurts a business.”
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Weltzin said reclassifying cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule III substance does not necessarily mean marijuana will be legal for medical reasons across the country, and it will not legalize marijuana outright for recreational use, but it does mean the federal government recognizes it has value medically. As far as the move possibly leading to wide-sweeping change by the federal government to legalize marijuana, Weltzin said there could be unintended consequences.
“You get interstate commerce,” she said. “State of Alaska excise tax as it currently stands could be completely out the window. And then the state is out roughly $2 million a month in marijuana excise tax. And so, we have to be careful and artful about how we think about federal legalization, and really engage with the stakeholders.
“It really should be more of a state rights approach,” she continued, “rather than just a sweeping federal change, because a lot of the businesses that are built specifically under the state programs could not survive a federal landscape if it’s not done correctly.”
Several state lawmakers who were asked on Tuesday if the potential move by the federal government could disrupt any legislation in the works this session declined to comment.
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