Passengers from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 are suing Boeing after a door-like panel on its Boeing 737 Max 9 plane detached midflight, causing rapid depressurization in the cabin, their attorneys said in a news release.
The complaint, filed Thursday in a Seattle court, names six passengers and a family member as plaintiffs. It says the Jan. 5 incident resulted physical injuries, including a concussion, bruises, difficulty breathing and bleeding ears, as well as emotional trauma. It also alleges that many of the oxygen masks on the plane seemed inoperable. Boeing declined to comment.
Alaska Airlines, which offered passengers an apology, a full refund for the aborted flight and $1,500 “to assist with any inconveniences,” is not named as a defendant in the case.
“This nightmare experience has caused economic, physical and ongoing emotional consequences that have understandably deeply affected our clients,” Daniel Laurence, a lawyer with the Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore firm, said in a statement. He pointed to what he called “Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun’s forthright admission that this terrifying event was caused by Boeing’s ‘mistake’” as the impetus for the proposed class-action suit. Calhoun told employees during a company meeting Tuesday that, “We’re going to approach this No. 1 acknowledging our mistake,” The Washington Post reported.
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The incident rekindled scrutiny of Boeing, which manufactured planes involved in two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, and prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to ground some Boeing 737 Max 9 planes as it investigates. This week, Alaska Airlines and United Airlines shared that technicians had found loose hardware in the same sections of the same type of aircraft in their fleets.
Shortly after the Ontario, Calif.-bound flight took off from Portland, Ore., carrying 171 passengers and six crew members, a portion of the plane’s wall known as a door plug blew out with a “sudden loud explosive noise,” according to the complaint. It left a gaping hole in the aircraft that one passenger told The Post was as wide as a refrigerator.
The rapid depressurization that followed ripped the shirt off a boy and sucked cellphones out of the plane, according to the court filing.
The plane made a safe emergency landing, but the event “physically injured some passengers and emotionally traumatized most if not all aboard,” the court filing said. It alleges that some people were bruised; the pressure change caused ears to bleed; and that, in combination with low oxygen, loud wind noise and trauma caused severe headaches.
The door blowout caused one plaintiff’s head to jolt, causing a concussion, and the pressure in her ears was so intense “she thought her head would explode,” the complaint says.
The filing also says numerous oxygen masks seemed not to work. Flight attendants tried to respond to concerns and carried oxygen bottles to some passengers, it says, “but did not or could not help all those whose oxygen masks seemed not to be functioning.”
The FAA said Thursday that it is investigating whether Boeing “failed to ensure completed products conformed to its approved design and were in a condition for safe operation in compliance with FAA regulations.” The FAA has grounded all Boeing 737 Max 9 planes with a door plug.
Boeing’s 737 Max line has a troubled history, with its 737 Max 8 at the centre of two fatal crashes within just months of each other in 2018 and 2019. Investigators in 2020 determined that the crashes were a “horrific culmination” of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency among Boeing’s management and “grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA.”
By washington post
