Three passengers of the Alaska Airlines Boeing, which returned to the departure airport without a door plug on January 5, filed a lawsuit demanding compensation. The victims will demand a billion US dollars from the carrier and Boeing.
The position of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit in Oregon at the end of February is that the incident occurred due to negligence.
“As a direct result of the horrific, life—threatening crash of the Boeing aircraft, Mr. Kwok, Mr. Rinker and Ms. Strickland suffered serious mental injuries, including post-traumatic stress and physical injury,” the document says. Separately, it indicates that a sudden change in cabin pressure caused bleeding from the ears of some passengers.
This is not the first appeal to the court by passengers of the ill-fated liner. A little earlier, 14 other airline customers also decided to seek compensation. Meanwhile, Boeing Corporation has also filed its own lawsuit, calling for the response of the operator — Alaska Airlines.
What happened in Portland on January 5, 2024
Flight 1282 took off from the megalopolis in Oregon to the California city of Ontario on January 5 at about 17:00. 40 minutes after taking off from the runway, the flight returned to Portland, making an emergency landing. The reason was that about the seventh minute of the flight, the Boeing’s “door plug” came off, that is, simply an unused door in the middle of the cabin. The plane had already reached an altitude of 4,900 meters at that moment. There were 174 passengers and six crew members on board.
“Suddenly I heard something like a strong explosion,” one of the passengers recalled. “I didn’t know for sure what was going on. Looking up, I saw that oxygen masks were hanging from the ceiling, and then I looked to the left and saw that a huge piece of the plane was simply missing. The wind was very powerful, it blew through the whole cabin.”
Perhaps only by a miracle no one died, but people lost several phones, which were sucked into the hole by the air flow. And a 15-year-old boy named John, who was flying with his mother, had his shirt torn off in a squall, but John turned out to be not timid and managed to quickly take another, safer place, and then put on one of the oxygen masks.
Due to the strong roaring wind and masks on their faces, people could not communicate by voice, but some found a way out – they typed words of support for each other in notes on their phone. When the plane finally landed, the applause was louder than usual. Doctors were already waiting for passengers on the runway to provide assistance, and in general everything went quite well, the survivors of the unusual emergency recall.
Later, an investigation found that Boeing was missing as many as four bolts that were supposed to attach this door plug. When this became known, American airlines urgently checked their vessels of the same type — the Boeing 737 Max 9. As a result, the same flaw was found on some other liners.
According to the materials cbsnews.com .
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