PORTLAND, Ore. — The emergency started with a bang three miles above Oregon.
The first six minutes of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 from Portland to Ontario International Airport in Southern California had been routine, the Boeing 737 Max 9 about halfway to its cruising altitude and traveling at more than 400 miles per hour.
As the plane climbed, the air pressure in the cabin steadily increased, a normal phenomenon compared to the rapidly thinning air outside. The plane's four flight attendants and 171 passengers were strapped into their seats, leaving the plane nearly full with 178 passengers.
Then boom.
A 7-by-4-foot section of fuselage covering a non-operational emergency exit behind the left wing blew out. The force of the cabin air being sucked out in a deafening rush twisted the metal brackets holding the seats next to the hole and ripped off the headrests – by fate they were two of the few unoccupied seats.
The near-vacuum also ripped open the closed cockpit door, sucked away the pilot's one-page emergency checklist and took off the co-pilot's headset. More than a dozen other seats, some far from the hole, were damaged by the force. Some passengers had their mobile phones ripped from their hands and sucked through the hole. Passengers said one teenager had his shirt ripped off. Dust filled the cabin.
“All oxygen masks were deployed immediately and everyone put them on,” Evan Smith, an attorney who was on the plane, told KATU-TV.
The pilots and flight attendants have not made any public statements and their names have not been released, but in interviews with National Transportation Safety Board investigators they described how their training started. The pilots focused on getting the plane back to Portland quickly and the flight attendants on keeping the passengers safe and as calm as possible.
“The actions of the flight crew were truly incredible,” NTSB Chairman Jennifer Homendy said at a news conference Sunday evening. She described the scene in the cabin during those first seconds as “chaos, very loud between the air and everything that was happening around them, and it was very violent.”
In the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot put on their oxygen masks and opened their microphones, but “communication was a serious problem” between them and the flight attendants because of the noise, Homendy said. They pulled out an emergency manual that was safely next to the captain's chair.
The co-pilot contacted air traffic controllers, declared an emergency and told the plane to immediately descend to 10,000 feet, the altitude at which there is enough oxygen for everyone on board to breathe.
“We have to get back to Portland,” she said in a calm voice that she maintained throughout the landing process.
Inside the cabin, the flight attendants immediately focused on the five unaccompanied minors in their care and the three infants being carried on their parents' laps.
'Were they safe? Were they safe? Were they wearing their seat belts or lap belts? And did they have their masks on? And they did,” Homendy said.
Some passengers began sending messages to loved ones on social media. A young woman said on TikTok that she was sure the plane was going to nosedive at any moment. She wondered how her death would affect her mother, fearing she would never recover from the grief.
But she and others said the cabin remained surprisingly calm. One passenger, Evan Granger, who was seated before the blowout, told NBC News that his “focus at that moment was on breathing through the oxygen mask and trusting that the flight crew will do everything they can to keep us safe.”
“I didn't want to look back and see what happened,” he said.
The pilots circled the plane back to Portland. Video taken by passengers showed flight attendants walking down the aisle to check on passengers. City lights could be seen through the flickering hole.
Smith told reporters that the descent and landing were loud but smooth. When the plane landed at Portland International about 20 minutes after departure, passengers burst into applause. Firefighters came down the aisle to check for injuries, but no one was seriously injured.
“There were so many things that had to go right for us all to survive,” Granger told NBC.
Homendy said if the blowout had occurred a few minutes later after the plane reached cruising altitude, the accident could have been a tragedy.
On Sunday, a passenger's cell phone was found sucked from the plane. It was still operational and had survived the five kilometer dive.
It was open to the owner's baggage claim receipt.
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Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.