Alaska Airlines 737-900 MAX loses a door in-flight out of PDX

[D Bru]

900ER checks probe

With Alaska 1282 we're of course looking at MAX-9 production (quality) issues. But following 21 Jan's FAA SAFO recommending also plug inspections on the 900ER, out of curiosity I ran a quick check in FAA's SDRS. For instance, for Delta alone it returned 31 anomaly reports on 15 of its 900ERs between 21 Jan and 2 Feb inclusive. That's an in my view at least not negligible nearly 10% of Delta's 160 900ER fleet. And I'm leaving out several separate reports which found torn plug seals while performing the inspections.

The 31 reports concern hardware anomalies, ranging from damaged, loose, wrong specs, but in most cases of missing cotter pins, washers, nuts and a good number of absent bolts (that is no hardware at all). There was also a case where an upper roller guide had cracked and a case where the upper roller guide bolts had been installed backwards/inverted. The most striking was that on two aircraft all four lower guide hinge bolts (and associated hardware) were missing completely (that is LH and RH).

IMO, such sample results show that this particular plug design would seem not only to be prone to production "escapes", but also to maintenance ones.

Regards