Plane banned in Spain just meters from crashing into the sea

Last Tuesday, one of the company’s Boeing 737 Max Southwest Airlines It came within just 400 feet (120 m) of crashing into the Pacific Ocean. The flight, which had departed from Honolulu for Lihue on the island of Kauai, experienced a violent crash after attempting to land in terrible weather conditions.

According to the portal preferentialOn the second landing attempt the aircraft rapidly dropped from 16,000 feet to only 400 feet (about 122 meters altitude). The incident occurred when, after aborting the first landing attempt, the first commander handed over the controls to the first officer, who caused the aircraft to suddenly crash due to an error in the power configuration. Cockpit alarms were activated, warning of the proximity of the sea and the commander, whose quick reaction was crucial to avoiding the accident, ordered to increase engine power and thus gain altitude.

Due to the dangerous situation, those responsible for the flight decided not to land at the destination airport, Kauai. After 1 hour and 54 minutes – the flight should have lasted about 20 minutes – the plane landed safely on the runway of its home island, Honolulu.

After the incident came to light, the airline… Southwest Airlines And the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has launched an investigation to clarify what happened. So far, there is no indication that the incident is related to previous problems with the 737 MAX model.

Defective titanium in Boeing planes

In short, in relation to the failures of some Boeing models in flight, federal authorities announced a few days ago that they were investigating Use of defective titanium, the origin of which appears to have been falsified. According to the new York Times, Apparently, an employee of the Chinese company selling the metal had falsified the documents certifying its origin.

According to the American newspaper, the company Spirit Aerosystems, The manufacturer, responsible for providing fuselage structures to Boeing and wings to Airbus, found that the titanium it was using to manufacture the parts had tiny holes in it due to corrosion.

The company claims it is investigating the origin of the titanium and, in the meantime, has removed the affected components from Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A220 models produced between 2019 and 2023 to carry out the relevant tests.

As for our country, Spain joined the European mandate in 2019 and ordered the suspension of all operations within its airspace that involved defective aircraft models Boeing. This decision, as was made at the time by Germany, France, Holland, Italy and the United Kingdom. It was taken in line with the directive of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to ground these aircraft models after two accidents Boeing 737 Max Involved.

The suspension was a precautionary move to ensure passenger safety, as the causes of the crashes were still under investigation. However, the grounding of the 737 MAX affected some airlines, such as Norwegian Airlines Although the fleet had 18 of these aircraft, the overall impact in Spain was relatively small as the country’s main airlines did not operate with this model.