“I didn’t know until we landed that there was a hole in the plane,” Emily Wiprud said in an interview with CBS News.
Explosion, air blast, emergency landing: the co-pilot of the Alaska Airlines Boeing that lost a door in flight in January said in an interview broadcast Wednesday that she surprisingly only discovered the gaping hole once she was back on the tarmac. “An explosion in my ears, then a blast of air”recalled Emily Wiprud in this interview with the American channel CBS News.
On January 5, 2024, she co-piloted a Boeing 737 MAX 9, which had taken off shortly before from Portland, Oregon, to reach California. “My body was pushed forward and there was also a loud bang”she added. “It was incredibly loud.” Captain and co-pilot then concentrate on an emergency landing.
Emily Wiprud doesn’t know it, but the plane has just lost a door stopper, a cover blocking a redundant emergency exit. “I didn’t know until we landed that there was a hole in the plane”she says. Once the device is back on dry land, her concern is to check that everyone is there: “I opened the cockpit door and saw hundreds of calm, silent eyes looking at me.”
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Award ceremony
The flight crew then tells him that there is “empty seats and injured people” among the passengers. But none of them fell from the plane though. “It didn’t take us long to confirm that we had 177 souls on board”she says. A teenager who was sitting next to the door had moved to another seat to avoid being sucked in, and Emily Wiprud then ran into his mother, who was looking for him: “Her son was gone. As a mother myself, I can’t even imagine that feeling.”
Along with the pilot, she will receive an award from the Air Line Pilots Association on Thursday for her professionalism. “My captain is a hero. Same for the flight attendants”assured Emily Wiprud. This incident, on a brand new plane, exposed 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 cap door from moving were missing.
