[alwa]

A single explosive decompression event, comprising the spontaneous loss of an assembly the size of an entire exit door, two months off the factory floor?

I should certainly hope they’d take a gander at the others before I’d sit next to one.

Especially with the memory of the last time they chose to keep flying 737 MAXes instead of fixing the defect in the rest of the fleet, at the cost of 157 lives, not even 5 years ago.

[nerdponx]

Let's also consider just how much worse this situation could have been. The door panel blew out next to the one seat that happened to be unoccupied, and it happened at 16,000 ft instead of 26,000 ft.

[ponector]

Not a big difference if everyone was with fastened seat belt.

There is a real story of another 737 of Aloha Airlines flight 243 where part of the fuselage blown away together with unlucky flight attendant at 24000 feet: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/falling-to-pieces-the-ne...

[smcin]

Aloha Airlines Flight 243 (Apr 28, 1988) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

[alwa]

And even so, sucked the shirt right off the boy in the middle seat! I shudder to imagine how things would have gone 20 minutes further in to the flight.

[siva7]

Almost certainly a fatal crash if they were a few minutes later into the flight

[akpa1]

No it's not. Crews are trained for decompression events and they've happened at higher altitudes than 26,000 feet before with no airframe loss at all (for example, the Southwest 737-700 where a fan blade ruptured the window happened at 33,000 feet). It may likely have been a fatal incident but definitely not likely a crash.