In an interview with CBS, Emily Wiprud explained that she did not “know until we landed that there was a hole in the plane.”
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.
“A blast in my ears, then a rush of air,” Wiprud recalled in an interview with 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.
Door torn off in mid-flight: How Boeing escaped disaster
“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 plane was back on dry land, his concern was to check that everyone was there: “I opened the cockpit door and saw hundreds of calm, silent eyes looking at me.”
“My captain is a hero”
The cabin crew then informed her that there were “empty seats and injured people” among the passengers. But none of them had fallen off the plane, however. “It didn’t take us long to confirm that we had 177 souls on board,” she said.
A teenager who was standing next to the door had moved to another seat to avoid being sucked in, and Emily Wiprud then encountered his 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, 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,” said Emily Wiprud.
This incident, on a brand new aircraft, revealed quality problems at the aircraft manufacturer.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a preliminary report in early February that was damning of Boeing: four bolts intended to prevent the door from moving were missing.
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