On Jan. 4 — one day before a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight that was climbing out of Portland, Ore. — engineers and technicians had heard of enough problems that they wanted the aircraft to come out of service for inspection and maintenance, according to a report by the New York Times.
Instead, the airline chose to keep the Boeing 737-9 MAX in service. It did, however, change the schedule so it would not fly over the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, but the airlines decided to keep it in service for three more flights, before pulling it into a maintenance hangar.
“Before the plane could complete that scheduled sequence of flights and go in for the maintenance check, the door plug blew out at 16,000 feet, minutes after embarking on the second flight of the day, from Portland to Ontario International Airport in California,” the newspaper reported.
In other related news, a whistleblower who raised concerns about sloppy manufacturing at the company’s 787 Dreamliner factory in South Carolina was found dead on Saturday, in what authorities said was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
John Barnett, who first filed a complaint with the U.S. Labor Department in 2017 under the AIR21 Whistleblower Protection Program, was in Charleston for a deposition related to his complaints about safety and quality, according to the BBC.
