Explosion, gust of air, emergency landing: The co-pilot of the Alaska Airlines Boeing that lost a door during a flight in January said in an interview broadcast Wednesday that she surprisingly only discovered the gaping hole once she was back on the runway.
“A blast in my ears, then a rush of air,” Emily Wiprud recalled in this interview with CBS News.
On January 5, 2024, he co-piloted a Boeing 737 MAX 9, which took off shortly before Portland, Oregon, to reach California.
“My body was pushed forward and there was also a loud bang,” he added. “It was incredibly loud.”
The captain and co-pilot then focus on an emergency landing.
Emily Wiprud doesn’t know it, but the device has just lost a plug, a cover that blocks a redundant emergency exit. “I didn’t know until we landed that there was a hole in the plane,” she says.
Once the plane returns to solid ground, his concern is to check that everyone is there: “I opened the cabin door and saw hundreds of calm, silent eyes looking at me.”
“My captain is a hero”
The flight crew then told him that there were “empty seats and injured people” among the passengers. But none of them fell out of the plane. “It didn’t take us long to confirm that we had 177 souls on board,” he says.
A teenager by the door had moved to another seat to avoid being sucked in, and Emily Wiprud then encountered her mother, who was looking for him: “Her son was no longer there. As a mother myself, I can’t even imagine that feeling.”
Along with the pilot, he will receive an award from the Airline Pilots Association on Thursday for his professionalism.
“My captain is a hero. So are the flight attendants,” said Emily Wiprud.
This incident, which occurred on a new aircraft, revealed quality problems at the aircraft manufacturer.
The Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a preliminary report in early February that was damning for Boeing: four bolts intended to prevent the door from moving were missing.
Source: BFM TV
