PORTLAND, Ore. (news agencies) — The loud “boom” was startling enough, and the roaring wind that immediately filled the airline cabin left Kelly Bartlett unnerved. Still, it wasn’t until a shaken teenager, shirtless and scratched, slid into the seat next to her that she realized just how close disaster had come.
A section of the Boeing 737 Max 9’s fuselage just three rows away had blown out — at 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) high — creating a vacuum that twisted the metal of the seats nearby, and snatched cellphones, headsets and even the shirt off the teenager’s back.
“We knew something was wrong,” Bartlett told media on Monday. “We didn’t know what. We didn’t know how serious. We didn’t know if it meant we were going to crash.”
The first six minutes of Alaska Airlines flight 1282 from Portland to Southern California’s Ontario International Airport on Friday had been routine, the Boeing 737 Max 9 about halfway to its cruising altitude and traveling at more than 400 mph (640 kph).
Flight attendants had just told the 171 passengers that they could resume using electronic devices — in airplane mode, of course — when it happened.
Then suddenly a 2-foot-by-4-foot (61-centimeter-by-122-centimeter) piece of fuselage covering an unoperational emergency exit behind the left wing blew out. Only seven seats on the flight were unoccupied, and as fate would have it, these included the two seats closest to the blown-out hole.
The oxygen masks dropped immediately, and Bartlett saw a flight attendant walking down the aisle toward the affected row, leaning forward as if facing a stiff wind. Then flight attendants began moving passengers from the area where the blowout occurred.
Among them was the teenage boy moved next to Bartlett.
“His shirt got sucked off of his body when the panel blew out because of the pressure, and it was his seatbelt that kept him in his seat and saved his life. And there he was next to me,” she said, adding that his mother was reseated elsewhere.
“We had our masks on, and the plane was really loud so we couldn’t talk. But I had a … notes app on my phone that I was typing on. So I typed to him and I asked him if he was hurt,” Bartlett said. “I just couldn’t believe he was sitting there and what he must have gone through, what he must have been feeling at the time.”
She said the boy typed back that he was OK, but a bit scratched, adding “that was unbelievable” and “thank you for your kindness.”
The exit door plug landed in the southwest Portland backyard of high school physics teacher Bob Sauer. Sauer said his heart “did start beating a little faster” when he saw it in the beam of his flashlight Sunday night as he searched for any debris.
“It was very obviously part of a plane,” he told a group of reporters outside his home on Monday. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, people have been looking for this all weekend and it looks like it’s in my backyard.’”
Sauer said he and the seven National Transportation Safety Board agents who came to his home to pick up the door plug were amazed it was intact. It appeared that tree branches had broken its fall.
A headrest landed on the patio of Sauer’s neighbor, Diane Flaherty. Flaherty didn’t realize what the charcoal-colored cushion was until a friend emailed her to say federal agents were looking for airplane parts in her neighborhood. An NTSB agent came by to pick it up.
“What are the chances that a headrest cushion falls out of the sky into your backyard?” she said.
The pilots and flight attendants have not made public statements and their names have not been released, but in interviews with National Transportation Safety Board investigators they described how their training kicked in. The pilots focused on getting the plane quickly back to Portland and the flight attendants on keeping the passengers safe and as calm as possible.
“The actions of the flight crew were really incredible,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said at a Sunday night news conference. She described the scene inside the cabin during those first seconds as “chaos, very loud between the air and everything going on around them and it was very violent.”
Bartlett echoed praise for the crew, saying the entire time she felt like the plane was under control even though the roaring wind was so loud she couldn’t hear the captain’s announcements.
“The flight attendants really responded well to the situation. They got everyone safe and then they got themselves safe,” she said. “And then there was nothing to do but wait, right? We were just on our way down and it was just a normal descent. It felt normal.”
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