Alaska Airlines pilot thought passengers were sucked out of plane when door blew on Boeing 737

Emily Wiprud didn’t know exactly what had happened, but the Alaska Airlines pilot was certain something was going very wrong as flight 1282 made its way out of Portland on January 5.

“The first indication was an explosion in my ears and then a whoosh of air,” Wiprud, an Alaska Airles pilot, told CBS News of the flight, which lost an exterior panel at 16,000 feet and had to make an an emergency landing. “My body was forced forward and there was a loud bang as well…The flight deck door was open. I saw tubes hanging from the cabin.” 

In the chaos, during which the Boeing 737 Max 9 jet lost a large panel called a door plug, her headset went flying out of the aircraft, as did some passengers’ mobile phones. She looked around and saw “empty seats and injuries” and feared some of the passengers had been thrown out of the plane too.

Wiprud said she recalls looking down the aisle of the plane and seeing rows of passengers stare back at her, some of them injured.

“I didn’t know that there was a hole in the airplane until we landed,” she added. “I knew something was catastrophically wrong.”

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board later revealed that the jet was missing bolts meant to hold on its door plug, a panel that covers slots in the plane body used for emergency exits and converts them into normal looking windows for passengers.

Miraculously, the plane was able to make an emergency landing in Portland with all 177 passengers and crew onboard.

The Alaska accident prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily ground all Boeing 737 Max 9s with the same door plug, the beginning of a series of scandals and issues at the storied aerospace company, which was soon under investigation by the FAA, DOJ, and FBI.

The ensuing scrutiny revealed a number of questionable practices, including a since discontinued method called “traveled work,” where components with known flaws made it to the production line and were fixed during assembly.

A series of whistleblowers came forward alleging further quality issues on Boeing production lines, and the company’s CEO announced he would step down by the end of the year.

In July, Boeing pleaded guilty to a felony charge for deceiving regulators who approved the 737 Max and agreed to pay a fine of at least $243.6m, as part of a case about 2018 and 2019 Max crashes that killed 346 people.

In space, meanwhile, a pair of NASA astronauts who traveled to the International Space Station in June on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft will be stuck on the research station until early next year, after it suffered mechanical issues on the voyage to space.

To add insult to injury, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunisa “Suni” Williams will hitch a ride back to Earth on a ship from Boeing rival SpaceX.