2024-01-06 22:27:37
FAA Orders Temporary Grounding of Boeing 737 Max 9 Planes Following Alaska Airlines Emergency Landing
The Federal Aviation Administration in the USA has ordered the temporary grounding of some of the Boeing 737 Max 9 planes following an incident that occurred tonight. An Alaska Airlines plane was forced to make an emergency landing after part of the plane’s fuselage disintegrated.
The federal agency’s announcement stated that 171 737 Max 9s in use by American airlines or under US jurisdiction will be grounded immediately and undergo emergency inspections before being cleared to resume operations. Each inspection is expected to take four to eight hours. “Safety will continue to drive our decision-making process,” said agency director Mike Whittaker.
United Airlines has also announced that it has suspended the use of some of its Max 9 planes and has conducted tests for 22 of the 79 planes in its fleet. The decision accounts for 60 percent of all the company’s flight cancellations today, and United has promised to help customers find alternative ways to travel.
The aviation administration’s decision comes after Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 made an emergency landing in Portland, shortly after taking off for Ontario, California, when part of the fuselage broke apart at an altitude of 16,000 feet. There were no casualties among the 171 passengers and six crew members.
Immediately after the incident, Alaska Airlines announced that it was grounding all 65 Max 9 aircraft and began testing. This evening it was reported that some of the planes can return to operations after no “disturbing findings” were detected. The 737 Max already has a troubled history. In October 2018, 189 people died in the crash of a Max 8 of the airline company Lion Air in Indonesia, and five months later another 157 people died in the crash of a similar model of the airline Ethiopian Airlines.
As a result, the planes of Max models were grounded for many months, the CEO of Boeing was dismissed, and the company made extensive changes to the plane. A report by the House of Representatives stated that the design was characterized by “technical design failures” and that there was a “lack of transparency” on the part of the company that cut costs.
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