Alaska Airlines cancels all flights on Boeing 737 MAX 9 through Saturday: NPR

Alaska Airlines through Saturday has canceled all flights on Boeing 737 Max 9 planes like the one that suffered an in-flight fuselage panel explosion last week as it awaits new instructions from Boeing and federal officials on how to inspect the fleet.

The development came as signs suggest some travelers may try to avoid flying on the Max 9 planes – at least temporarily.

Seattle-based Alaska Airlines said on Wednesday that it would cancel 110 to 150 flights per day while its MAX 9 planes remained grounded. By late afternoon, Alaska had canceled about 125 flights, one-fifth of its schedule for the day.

“We hope this measure provides guests with more certainty, and we are working around the clock to reaccommodate affected guests on other flights,” the airline said on its website.

United Airlines, the only other U.S. airline to operate the Max 9 planes, canceled 167 flights due to the grounding order.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all Max 9 planes in the United States on Saturday, a day after a panel called a door seal blew off an Alaska Airlines plane over Oregon, leaving a hole in the side of the plane. The plug replaces the extra doors used on Max 9s equipped with more seats than the Alaskan uses.

The pilots of Flight 1282 were able to return to Portland, Oregon, and make a safe emergency landing. No serious injuries were reported.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said this week that they did not find four bolts used to help secure the 63-pound door seal, and they are not sure whether the bolts were missing before the plane took off or broke during the flight.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved inspection and repair guidelines developed by Boeing on Monday. However, the agency on Tuesday ordered Boeing to review the instructions based on “comments received in response.”

The order to revise the guidelines came after Alaska and United reported finding loose bolts and other problems in the panel doors of an unspecified number of other Max 9 vehicles they had begun examining.

A Boeing engineer was present during some of the inspections in Alaska, “and yes, he used that term, loose bolt,” Boeing CEO David Calhoun said.

Asked how the plane was allowed to fly in the first place, Calhoun told CNBC: “Because there was a high-quality escape.”

Boeing said Wednesday it was updating inspection procedures based on feedback from the FAA and airlines, and the FAA reiterated an earlier pledge to let safety decide when planes will fly again. Neither of them said how long this might take.

The door seals are installed by Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems, but investigators have not said which company employees last worked on the seal on the ill-fated Alaska plane.

Earlier this week, Calhoun told employees at the 737 plant in Renton, Washington, that the company “acknowledges our mistake… and that this event can never happen again.”

Boeing, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, did not allow reporters to attend the event, but released a four-minute clip in which Calhoun emphasized safety and said Boeing’s airline customers were monitoring the company’s response to the current crisis.

“Moments like this shake them to the bone, just as they shook me to the bone,” he said, adding that Boeing must reassure airlines that the planes are safe.

“We’ll see our way to that, but we have to know that we’re starting from a very anxious moment for our customers,” he told Boeing employees.

Some travelers are monitoring the unfolding investigation as well.

Kayak, a travel search site owned by Booking Holdings, said Wednesday that after the Alaska flight bombing, it saw a three-fold jump in the number of people filtering their searches to isolate aircraft type. A Kayak spokeswoman acknowledged that the jump — from the low numbers — prompted the site to make it easier to find its jet type candidate.

“Any time an airplane model becomes a household name, something goes wrong,” said Scott Keyes, founder of the travel site Going.

Once the FAA allows the planes to fly — “assuming no further incidents occur” — the public’s memory will fade, Keyes said. He predicted that within six months, fewer people would care about the type of aircraft when booking a flight.

The Max – of which there are two flying models, the larger 8 and 9, and two more in development – is the latest version of Boeing’s half-century-old 737. Two Max 8 planes crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. The plane has had manufacturing quality problems ever since.