‘Are we going down?” Passengers on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 describe fear, confusion

After hosting her two young grandchildren during Christmas break, Vicki Kreps boarded Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in Portland to accompany them back to their parents in California. Brady Black, 7, in the window seat, started watching a movie on his iPad and his younger sister, Brynlee Black, 5, played a game on her iPad. Their grandmother settled into the aisle seat beside them in Row 19, on the left side of the cabin.

As the plane passed 10,000 feet, Kreps said they were “pitched forward” in their seats, likening it to what happens when you’re riding in a car and the driver slams on the brakes. Then a sudden gush of wind pushed them back in their seats. Oxygen masks came down in front of them and the cabin pressure dropped.

“Grammy, they want us to put them on, right?” Brady asked her. Kreps told him yes, and the 7-year-old fastened the mask over his mouth while Kreps put her mask on and then helped her 5-year-old granddaughter, whose eyes were tearing up. Kreps, 56, noticed what she thought was smoke in the air and slightly lowered her mask to check while she took a quick look around her.

“Over my left shoulder,” she said, “I saw the hole in the cabin. ’’ She saw a yawning gash where the plane’s left door plug had been in Row 26. It had ripped from the fuselage of the Boeing 737-9 Max shortly after the flight took off about 5 p.

m. Friday from Portland International Airport with 174 passengers headed to Ontario, California. The plug appears to be door from the outside of the plane but looks like a regular window and wall panel from the inside with a row of seats.

It’s a space for an emergency exit when the cabin configuration has more seats. On planes with fewer seats, like Flight 1282, the hatch is “plugged. ” Kreps stretched her left hand and arm across the laps of her grandchildren and the three said a prayer together that they would remain safe.

Seven rows up from Kreps in window seat 12A, Nicholas Hoch, 33, had his noise-canceling headphones on listening to a podcast on Tokyo, preparing for his future trip to Japan. He suddenly heard “this pop, this boom, a kind of mini-explosion” from the back of the plane about five to 10 minutes into the flight. The cabin rapidly lost pressure, he said.

Hoch clamped down his blue Coal ball cap before it nearly blew off his head. He fumbled to get his oxygen mask but worried because the bag wasn’t inflating right away. Then he heard a flight attendant’s alert.

“Get your oxygen masks on, your seatbelts fastened,” a flight attendant directed in a tense, serious tone over the cabin’s intercom. The tone cemented for Hoch that something was seriously wrong with the plane. Hoch was looking around, asking if people were OK, but it was hard to talk with the masks on.

He said he was rattled and not sure what was happening. The passengers described a sense of falling. Kreps’ grandchildren said their ears were burning.

Others said their ears began to pop. The plane quickly started to drop in altitude. And then it seemed the plane began banking sharply to the right once, continued in a straight path and then banked a tight right once again.

“Are we going down?” he wondered. He said fear set in and he started texting his girlfriend, who he was flying to visit, and other loved ones. “I don’t know what’s going on in my plane.

There’s something wrong with it. I love you guys,” he said he texted. The woman next to him appeared petrified and kept her head facing down, he said.

He saw a couple of flight attendants walk back down the aisle wearing their own oxygen masks and carrying separate tanks while they checked on passengers. Hoch said he relaxed somewhat when the plane seemed to level out and appeared to be flying smoothly again. But then one woman further back in the plane suddenly got up out of her seat and yelled, “Oh my god! Someone’s shirt was sucked out of the plane! There’s a hole in the plane!” About three or four rows behind Hoch on the opposite right side of the cabin he said another man unbuckled his seatbelt, took his mask off, started pointing and shouting, “There’s a (expletive) hole in the plane! There’s a (expletive) hole in the plane.

Oh my god, there’s a hole! That shouldn’t be there!” Hoch, with his mask on, urged the man to sit back down. Another message came over the plane’s intercom: “Please remain seated. Please sit down.

It’s not safe to be up. Keep your oxygen mask on!” A woman with her two sons under age 10 seated behind Hoch tried to pull them close to her. Kelly Bartlett, 46, said she had just gotten out her dinner and took one bite when she heard a loud boom and the plane filled with wind and noise.

She said the 15-year-old boy who was sitting near the hole and whose shirt had been sucked off jumped over her and sat down in the vacant seat beside her. In a Facebook post, Bartlett said it was too loud to talk or hear anything on the plane so she communicated with the teen using hand gestures and the notes app on her cellphone. Bartlett noticed redness on his skin.

“Did you get hurt?” she wrote, based on a screenshot of their swapped notes. “Arm is abit (sic) scratched that was unbelievable my name is Jack … thanks for your kindness,” he wrote back. They later shared a selfie photo together.

For the most part, passengers stayed relatively calm, Hoch said. “People were just wide-eyed, startled and shocked,” he said. Kreps, who was with her grandchildren, looked over and saw a mother in the aisle seat across from her kind of wrestling to keep the mask over her infant son on her lap.

“So I just laid my right hand on her shoulder,” Kreps said, in a show of support. Kreps struggled to communicate with her grandchildren because it was so loud in the cabin or hear any announcements on the plane. She had to get her mouth right up to their ears so they’d hear her.

She did hear the pilot announce they were preparing to land. The landing thankfully was uneventful, Kreps and Hoch said. Once back at Portland International Airport, the captain came on the intercom.

He told passengers that there was indeed a hole in the plane. “You could tell that he was just as disoriented as we all were,” said Hoch, a Portland architect and urban planner originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Paramedics who were waiting for the plane’s return boarded and went straight to the 15-year-old who was closest to the door plug that blew off.

Hoch saw the teen ultimately walk off the plane wearing a makeshift large hockey or baseball jersey he pulled out of his bag. Once the plane landed, Kreps got a ping from her daughter and immediately Facetimed her. She showed Brady and Brynlee, who still had their masks on but flashed smiles that they were OK.

Hoch was relieved. “They nailed it. They just did an incredible job,” he said of the pilots and crew.

Everyone lived. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the cause and recovered the door plug from a science teacher’s yard in the West Haven-Sylvan neighborhood Monday morning. The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded all 7373-9 Maxes for inspection.

The passengers filed out of the plane like any other flight – queuing up at their seats and then waiting to head down the main aisle in an orderly fashion, he said. It had a surreal quality, given what everyone had just experienced, he said. A flight attendant at the gate directed them to go to guest services at another gate to figure out other flight arrangements, Hoch said.

“This is crazy, are we just done?” Hoch remembered thinking. He hung around for a bit to look out the terminal’s large glass windows at the plane he just left. “I wanted to see the hole,” he said.

Then Hoch got in line with more than 100 other passengers and waited for about three hours. He was surprised that few people talked about what they had just endured and instead seemed focused on their phones. “I was kind of befuddled.

No one wants to talk about this?” he said he thought. When he reached the help desk, an attendant asked what he wanted to do. “What do you mean?” he asked, wondering if he even wanted to get on a flight because he hadn’t fully processed what had just occurred.

He decided to take the special 10:30 p. m. replacement flight to California arranged by the airline for Fight 1282 passengers.

Despite an hour delay, it reached its destination with no problems. Bartlett got rebooked on a Delta flight and made it to California later that night. “I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do, but getting right back on a plane was probably the best thing for me so I didn’t end up with a lifetime fear of flying,” she wrote on her Facebook page.

Kreps decided to return to her home in Bush Prairie, Washington, with her grandchildren. Brynlee was complaining of a stomachache. Kreps thought that would be better for the children after the ordeal and she and her husband arranged a flight the following day back to California.

Kreps credits her longtime experience as a nurse for helping keep herself and her young grandchildren calm – and prayer. Kreps is director of nurses for Kaiser Permanente’s mental health and addiction department based in Portland. “I’ve dealt with emergencies for most of my life,” she said.

Her son also is a pilot. When she realized no one got sucked out of the plane, she figured they’d be OK. As she and her grandkids prepared to take a 11:30 a.

m. flight the next day to California out of Portland she videotaped the pair talking about their adventure. Brady said he wanted to be on the news, so his grandmother did a mock interview.

“First I was just sitting down watching a movie and all of a sudden I just looked forward and a big burst of wind in my face and these mask-es come down and then I put it on and I just breathed through,” Brady says, as his grandmother videotaped him with her phone. “That’s because I want to be safe. I don’t want to do anything bad,” he said.

Kreps asked what had happened. “Our plane broke a piece off, like a door,” Brady said, “And we don’t know how it broke off,” his sister added, as they sat together at the gate awaiting their next flight. “And we’re wondering where it flew,” Brady added.

Were they scared, asked Kreps. “I was scared,” Brylee admitted. “I was half scared,” her brother said.

They said they followed the rules. Are you getting back on the flight today, Kreps asked. “Yes,” Brady said, his legs swinging back and forth, “because it’s a rare chance.

It’s one out of a 1,000 chance. ” Then he corrected himself: “Like one out of an infinity chance it’s going to happen again. But it did happen last night.

I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I’m just cool with it. ” Once back home in California, Brady had his grandma film another video.

He held one of the aircraft safety cards in his lap. He explained why kids should pay attention to them: “The first reason is to be safe. The second reason is you don’t want to get hurt on any airplane.

That’s why you should always be ready. And the third, to have fun!” — Maxine Bernstein Email ; 503-221-8212 Follow on Twitter Our journalism needs your support. Please become a subscriber today at.