Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 Door Plug Blows Out at 16,000 Feet, Exposing Continued Boeing Safety Failures

A door plug blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, a Boeing 737 MAX 9, at 16,000 feet during climb six minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon. The explosive decompression ripped the door plug from the fuselage, leaving a gaping hole in the aircraft. Miraculously, all 171 passengers and 6 crew members survived with only minor injuries, but only because the two seats directly adjacent to the door plug happened to be empty. Had passengers been seated there, they would have been sucked out of the aircraft to certain death.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigation found that four critical bolts securing the door plug were never installed at Boeing’s Renton, Washington factory. After Spirit AeroSystems delivered the fuselage to Boeing with damaged rivets near the door plug, Boeing workers removed the door plug to repair the rivets. When they reinstalled the plug, they failed to install any of the four securing bolts. The NTSB’s probable cause determination blamed “Boeing’s failure to provide adequate training, guidance, and oversight necessary to ensure that manufacturing personnel could consistently and correctly comply with its parts removal process.”

The NTSB also cited “the FAA’s ineffective compliance enforcement surveillance and audit planning activities, which failed to adequately identify and ensure that Boeing addressed the repetitive and systemic nonconformance issues associated with its parts removal process.” This finding confirmed that three years after the 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people, neither Boeing nor the FAA had reformed their fundamentally broken safety culture and oversight relationship.

The door plug blowout occurred just three years into Boeing’s deferred prosecution agreement from the 737 MAX fraud case, which required Boeing to maintain robust compliance and safety programs. The incident proved the company had learned nothing from 346 deaths and faced no genuine consequences. Boeing’s manufacturing processes remained so defective that workers could forget to install critical structural bolts and the error would go undetected through multiple quality checkpoints.

The FAA grounded all 737 MAX 9 aircraft with door plugs pending inspections, finding additional aircraft with loose or missing bolts. Boeing paid Alaska Airlines $160 million in initial compensation. The incident triggered new DOJ scrutiny of whether Boeing had violated its deferred prosecution agreement, though the agency ultimately declined to hold the company accountable for the breach.