The Boeing plane was forced to make an emergency landing after a crack was discovered in the cockpit window

News

by Catherine Dunleavy

A Boeing plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Japan on Saturday after the cabin crew discovered a crack in the cockpit window.

An All Nippon Airways spokesman said the break was found in the outer layer of four layers of windows surrounding the cockpit.

The pilot turned around and returned to Sapporo-New Chitose Airport. The flight was making about an hour-and-a-half trip to Toyama when the crack was discovered.

Fortunately, no injuries were reported among the 59 passengers and six crew members.

“The crack was not something that affected flight control or pressurization,” the spokesman said.

The plane was a 737-800, not the 737 Max 9 that made headlines last week when the cabin panel on an Alaska Airlines plane exploded just minutes into its flight, a catastrophic failure that miraculously caused no deaths.

A door plug came off the plane and fell 16,000 feet into the backyard of a teacher in Portland, Oregon.

Federal investigators probing the near-catastrophic fuselage panel explosion are looking into the possibility that devices that were supposed to keep them safe were never installed in the first place.

United Airlines reported finding loose bolts and “installation issues” on some Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes following the incident.

The National Transportation Safety Board grounded all Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft on Friday, announcing it would impose stricter safety inspections and tighten oversight of the company itself.

Growing allegations of inadequate on-site quality and technical support for its suppliers, as well as questionable concerns about safety at Spirit Aerosystems' plants where the 737 MAX planes are manufactured, may also give some insight into the ground accident to the manufacturer's employers. He told the Wall Street Journal.

“It's common knowledge at Spirit that if you make a lot of noise and cause a lot of trouble, you're going to get hurt,” Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Spirit, told the newspaper.

“It doesn't mean you completely ignore things, but they don't want you to find everything and write it down.”

All Boeing Max planes have been grounded for two years after two plane crashes involving Indonesia's Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people.

With mail wires