PORTLAND, Ore. —
The loud "boom" was startling enough, and the roaring wind that immediately filled the airline cabin left Kelly Bartlett unnerved. Still, it wasn’t until a shaken teenager, shirtless and scratched, slid into the seat next to her that she realized just how close disaster had come.
A section of the Boeing 737 Max 9’s fuselage just three rows away had blown out — at 4.8 kilometers (3 miles ) high — creating a vacuum that twisted the metal of the seats nearby, and snatched cellphones, headsets and even the shirt off the teenager’s back.
"We knew something was wrong," Bartlett told The Associated Press on Monday. "We didn’t know what. We didn’t know how serious. We didn’t know if it meant we were going to crash."
The first six minutes of Alaska Airlines flight 1282 from Portland to Southern California’s Ontario International Airport on Friday had been routine, the Boeing 737 Max 9 about halfway to its cruising altitude and traveling at more than 640 kph (400 mph).
Flight attendants had just told the 171 passengers that they could resume using electronic devices — in airplane mode, of course — when it happened.
Then suddenly a 61-centimeter-by-122-centimeter (2-foot-by-4-foot) piece of fuselage covering an unoperational emergency exit behind the left wing blew out. Only seven seats on the flight were unoccupied, and as fate would have it, these included the two seats closest to the blown-out hole.
The oxygen masks dropped immediately, and Bartlett saw a flight attendant walking down the aisle toward the affected row, leaning forward as if facing a stiff wind. Then flight attendants began moving passengers from the area where the blowout occurred and helped them move away.
Among them was the teenage boy moved next to Bartlett.
