For a flight to be imperiled by a simple and preventable manufacturing or maintenance error is an anomaly with ominous implications.
This article was originally featured on MIT Press. On January 6, as Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, a Boeing 737 MAX 9, was climbing out of Portland, a large section of the aircraft’s structure, a fuselage door-plug, broke free in flight. With the plug gone the cabin violently decompressed with a clamorous boom and gale that ripped headrests from their moorings. The mother of a teenage boy seated just in front of the rupture clung to him as his shirt was torn from his body and sucked into the void.
So it is that the awesome mundanity of modern flight is ostensibly built on ever more detailed engineering analyses and rigorous regulatory oversight: standards, measurements, and calculations. Like sausages and scriptures, however, these formal practices look increasingly spurious when the circumstances of their production are examined closely.
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‘Whistling sound’ heard on previous Boeing Max 9 flight before door plug blowout, lawsuit allegesPassengers on the flight before Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 allegedly heard and reported the sound “coming from the vicinity of the door plug.”
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