After an Alaska Airline 737 Max 9 lost a window section as it was gaining altitude after takeoff from Portland on Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered 171 of the aircraft worldwide grounded until the aircraft can be inspected and maintenance safety procedures reviewed, USA Today reports.
The panel that blew out of Friday’s Alaska Air flight was a door exit plug, a piece that can be inserted instead of an emergency door exit when the plane is in certain configurations based on passenger loads. If the plane carries fewer passengers, fewer exits are needed. And removing an exit means lowering weight, which means less fuel and … ain’t capitalism grand?
While using door exit plugs isn’t unusual, having blowouts midflight is, so the manufacturer will review installation procedures and checks with planes in the same configuration. Each check and inspection should take between four and eight hours, and then a determination will be made if the issue was specific to this specific plane, its configuration or another larger system. It’s the latest question in the history of the Boeing Max: introduced in 2017, one Max 8 crashed in 2018 and another in 2019. The planes only returned to service after Boeing made a global update to an automated flight control system that may have somehow caused the crashes.