After three weeks of being grounded, the Boeing 737 Max 9 is returning to service.
11.01.2024 - 01:47 / nytimes.com / Jennifer Homendy
Officials investigating why a panel on a Boeing 737 Max 9 blew open during an Alaska Airlines flight last week say they are struggling to piece together exactly what happened because the plane’s cockpit voice recorder overwrote itself before it could be retrieved.
This is not a new problem. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation, has recommended for years that recorders be programmed to capture up to 25 hours of audio before automatically resetting themselves, but the Federal Aviation Administration has been reluctant to mandate longer recordings.
The F.A.A. last month proposed 25-hour recorders on new planes but argued that adding them to the existing fleet of U.S. planes would be too expensive. In addition, a pilots’ union has opposed the move to 25-hour recordings unless Congress puts in place protections that would prohibit their release to the public.
The chairwoman of the safety board, Jennifer Homendy, said the agency’s investigators had conducted 10 investigations since 2018 in which the cockpit voice recorder had been written over, with critical recordings lost forever. The voice recorders are among the key pieces of evidence that investigators use in reconstructing the events that led up to accidents as they work to establish a cause.
Ms. Homendy said a recording from the Alaska Airlines flight would have contained a lot of important information, including the bang that the crew described hearing soon after the plane took off on Friday from Portland, Ore. She said the recording would have enabled investigators to hear communications between the crew during the incident and identify any communications problems, including any audible alerts in the cockpit.
“There’s so much information that we can get off of C.V.R. that’s outside of just the communication amongst the flight crew,” Ms. Homendy said. “That is such a key piece of evidence to improve safety. Without that, we are piecing together things from interviews and losing a lot.”
Members of the flight crew told federal investigators that they had been so focused on going through their emergency checklist, communicating with air traffic control and getting the plane on the ground that they hadn’t heard any alerts. Federal investigators have not implied that the pilots or the flight’s crew made any errors.
“So now that’s what they don’t remember, and we have no evidence that it was happening,” Ms. Homendy said. “So if there was some sort of failure of any sort of oral alert, we wouldn’t know about it.”
Alaska Airlines said in a statement on Wednesday that because of the active investigation, it could not comment on why audio from the cockpit recorder was not recovered in time. But the airline added that it
After three weeks of being grounded, the Boeing 737 Max 9 is returning to service.
A major travel search engine is giving people the option of excluding flights using Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft from its results.
Southwest Airlines is removing the Boeing 737 Max 7 from its 2024 fleet plans due to certification delays.
The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it is halting any production expansion of the Boeing 737 Max, after a door plug suddenly fell off an Alaska Airlines jet.
Based on its inspection of the first 40 of more than 170 jets, the Federal Aviation Administration appears ready to allow the Boeing 737 Max 9 back in the air.
Alaska Airlines has begun preliminary inspections on some of its Boeing 737-9 Max aircrafts this weekend, adding that up to 20 planes could undergo inspection, the company said on Saturday.
Alaska Airlines said it will extend its cancellation of Boeing 737 Max 9 flights through Tuesday, Jan. 16, for planes that have been grounded since last week’s mid-air cabin panel blowout.
Some Seattle fliers are switching their trips to Delta Air Lines as hometown carrier Alaska Airlines’ schedule takes a hit from the latest Boeing 737 Max grounding.
An Alaska Airlines flight departing Portland International Airport (PDX) on Friday night experienced a sudden cabin decompression as a fitting on its fuselage shot away from the plane, leaving a gaping hole in the airplane as frightened passengers scrambled to put on emergency oxygen masks.
Alaska Airlines said it is canceling all flights operated on the Boeing 737 Max 9 through January 13 as it awaits approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct inspections on the aircraft.
The recent blowout aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 is just the latest problem Boeing has faced with its 737 Max aircraft. The accident prompted Alaska and United Airlines to cancel hundreds of flights as the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the temporary grounding of certain 737 Maxes so affected carriers could examine them.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said safety will dictate the timeline of returning Boeing’s 737 Max 9 aircraft to service following the sudden loss of a door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane.