“Everything was going fine until we just heard like a loud bang! Or like a boom. And I look up, and the air masks are, like, out, popped down.”
“And I looked to my left, and there’s just this huge gaping hole, on the left side where the window is.”
That’s how one passenger described to NBC News an incident on an Alaska Airlines flight that was forced to make an emergency landing in January after a door plug fell off the fuselage — leaving a hole in the side of the plane — in midair.
The missing door plug on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 from Portland, Oreg. on Jan. 5, 2024. (NTSB)
The Boeing aircraft, carrying 174 passengers and six crew members, was able to turn around and land safely back at Portland International Airport with no one seriously injured. But the high-profile incident prompted probes by both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board to determine whether Boeing had failed to ensure safety compliance.
And that was just the most highly visible of air incidents that have made headlines in the past year. Recent headlines have recounted nerve-wracking incidents on commercial flights, with planes making emergency landings or rolling off runways.
The NTSB defines an incident as