Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 passengers find their voices as lawsuits mount

When Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 passenger Suzannah Anderson saw the look on the flight attendants’ faces, she knew it was time to start texting her loved ones.

Anderson, sitting in the front row of the Boeing 737 MAX 9, looked up from her book when she heard a loud bang behind her. As she turned toward the screams coming from the rear of the plane, she saw what she thought was smoke and felt her coat and phone start to tug backward.

She works in health care and knows how to recognize danger by the facial expressions of those in charge. The flight attendants who moments before asked what she would like to drink now wore a different look on their faces.

Anderson texted her son to say that “he was and has been the best part of my life.” As the plane started to descend, she felt the grief of knowing there would be people she loved that she didn’t get to say goodbye to.

Further back in the plane, in row 28, Garet Cunningham looped his arm through his girlfriend’s, hoping to hold on to her, as they stared at a gaping hole two rows ahead in the side of the plane. 

Cunningham had his eyes closed and was jolted awake by the noise and rush of air as the hole opened. Now he couldn’t take his eyes away. 

“My mind couldn’t grasp what was going on,” he said. As it dawned on him what could happen, he kept thinking “I’m not prepared for this. I wasn’t prepared to die on this flight.” 

Anderson and Cunningham were among the 171 passengers aboard Flight 1282 who on Jan. 5 suddenly found themselves donning oxygen masks and holding on to armrests — or one another — after a panel blew out of the plane at 16,000 feet in the air. That panel was a door plug, filling a space in Boeing’s 737 MAX 9 planes that some airlines use as an emergency exit.

The flight landed safely back at Portland International Airport shortly after the blowout. There, some passengers reported non-life-threatening injuries, but none of the catastrophic consequences that could have been a possibility if the plane had been higher in the air when the panel blew. 

But, while still in the air, passengers prepared themselves for those grim possibilities. Many said they couldn’t hear any information from flight attendants and that their oxygen masks didn’t appear to be working. Some, like Anderson, didn’t know how much of the plane was missing. Others, including Cunningham, didn’t know if the pilot could land the plane safely with a chunk taken from the side. 

In the days since the incident, passengers and other travelers have looked for answers about what went wrong and how it could have been prevented.

Regulators and consumers have turned their attention to different parts of the aviation industry, including Alaska; Boeing; Spirit AeroSystems, the supplier that builds the fuselage of Boeing’s 737 MAX 9 planes; and the Federal Aviation Administration, the regulatory agency that has oversight of Boeing’s processes and quality control systems. 

Roughly 20 passengers have sued the manufacturer and the airline in the last two weeks — and that number is expected to grow. Cunningham and Anderson are among those suing. The pair spoke Thursday at a news conference hosted by the Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore law firm, one of the firms representing passengers.

Boeing and Alaska have declined to comment on pending litigation. Both companies have expressed sympathy for the passengers and say MAX 9 planes won’t return to the skies until each has been inspected.

Mark Lindquist, an attorney based in Tacoma, is representing six passengers in a lawsuit against Boeing and Alaska, including a mother and her 13-year-old daughter.

The Stritmatter law firm, based in Seattle, is representing 13 passengers, and is in communication with several more. That firm filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Boeing last week with six passengers and one family member named. This week, the firm added Alaska Airlines as a defendant and another half dozen passengers as plaintiffs, including Anderson. Cunningham was named in the original lawsuit.

“The reason we sued Boeing was because the defect appears to be a Boeing defect,” Daniel Laurence, one of the lawyers with the Stritmatter firm, said Thursday. But, “as the information developed … it became quite apparent that Alaska Airlines, which has purchased roughly a third of the 737 MAX 9 aircraft, was surely in a position to know some of the situation with Boeing that has been occurring over the last few years.” 

“This is indicative of a really unsettling trend,” Laurence said. 

“By the grace of God and 10 minutes”

Flight 1282 passengers have reported that flight attendants were handing out oxygen bottles, according to the Stritmatter firm. 

One mother, who is named in the lawsuit but did not participate in the news conference, said she felt her oxygen mask had stopped working, attorneys recounted at Thursday’s news conference. The mother continued trying to get a mask on her 1-year-old son. She was on the flight with three children. Maybe one of them would survive, she thought to herself. 

“Alaska, Boeing, Spirit, whomever, needs to understand how important this was,” Cunningham said at the conference. “It’s only by the grace of God and 10 minutes that I’m still here.”

Boeing, and specifically its MAX aircraft, have been scrutinized in recent years. Both MAX models currently in service, MAX 8 and MAX 9, were grounded globally in 2019 following the two deadly MAX 8 crashes. 

In 2021, the FAA ordered Boeing to undertake multiple corrective actions to improve quality control in building the MAX.

Boeing has pledged to “help address any and all findings” as airlines begin inspecting other MAX 9 planes and has said it will comply with regulatory investigations. The company hired retired U.S. Navy Adm. Kirkland Donald to conduct an independent review of Boeing’s processes and quality control systems. 

“We support all actions that strengthen quality and safety and we are taking actions across our production system,” the company said in a statement last week.

Boeing has declined to comment on the lawsuits.

In the litigation against Alaska, attorneys for both lawsuits have pointed to the airline’s decision not to fly the plane used in Flight 1282 over oceans, following several depressurization warnings from December and January. 

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation into the fuselage blowout, said she does not think the depressurization warnings are related. In a news conference shortly after the incident, she discounted the likelihood of negligence by the airline.

But, even if the events are not related, Laurence, from the Stritmatter law firm, said the decision to fly the plane some places and not others is concerning.

Passengers don’t often get a voice in the NTSB investigation process, Laurence continued. A lawsuit can help uncover aspects of the situation that investigators may not reach.

Alaska said it does not comment on pending litigation. It said Thursday the NTSB is investigating the allegations about the oxygen masks and that it is limited in what it can disclose while that investigation is ongoing.

The Stritmatter firm has not named MAX 9 fuselage builder Spirit in the lawsuit because “Boeing’s already said the buck stops with Boeing,” Laurence said. He didn’t rule out the possibility of adding Spirit later.

Alaska, meanwhile, has a “duty to do everything they can to make sure you arrive safely at your destination,” Laurence said. “And I know that’s their goal … but they’re not trying hard enough.”

“No direction” for what comes next

Anderson, who lives in Portland, wasn’t sure she was safe until she saw firefighters step onto the plane at Portland International Airport. If the firefighters were on board, surely the plane wasn’t at risk, she reasoned with herself. 

When she stepped off the aircraft and into the airport terminal, no one was there to greet her. She went to a nearby desk to ask what she was supposed to do. The worker seemed confused, Anderson remembered, and pointed her to customer service. 

Alaska expressed concern and appeared empathetic, but “there was no direction,” Anderson said.

When she turned back around, there was a line of seemingly 150 people waiting to talk to the customer service representatives. 

“Under very difficult conditions on the night of Jan. 5, we’re proud of our team in Portland who worked incredibly hard to care for our guests,” Alaska said in a statement to The Seattle Times Thursday. 

Alaska has offered to refund customers the price of their ticket, as well as a $1,500 payment. But it’s not clear if all the passengers on board have been contacted by Alaska to set that up, Laurence said at the Thursday news conference. 

According to the lawsuit from the Stritmatter firm, passengers were offered the option to get on another plane that evening to continue to their original destination, Ontario, Calif. That flight was also operating a Boeing 737 MAX 9, which were grounded by the FAA the following day. 

Some passengers boarded but others were hesitant. One unaccompanied minor who was on the plane texted their parents about the situation, said Furhad Sultani, a lawyer with the Stritmatter firm, speaking at the news conference. Not wanting their child to get back on a plane, their family drove from California to Oregon that night. 

Both Cunningham and Anderson said they would avoid flying Alaska in the future.

After spending an extra weekend in Portland, Cunningham said he and his girlfriend boarded a plane to head home to Corona, Calif. As the plane started to ascend, Cunningham saw his girlfriend was crying.