FBI says Alaska Airways passengers in Boeing door plug blowout might be crime victims

When information broke that Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 had a door plug blow out at 16,000 ft, it was understandably terrifying for these on board. Fortunately, nobody was severely injured, though a few cell phones did get sucked out of the plane. Passengers have since sued both Alaska Airlines and Boeing, the manufacturer of the plane they had been on. And now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has contacted passengers saying they could be victims of a criminal offense, NBC News reports.

Mark Lindquist, a lawyer representing the passengers of their lawsuit, shared the FBI’s letter with NBC Information, which opens with the road, “I’m contacting you as a result of we have now recognized you as a doable sufferer of a criminal offense.” The letter went on to clarify {that a} legal investigation “generally is a prolonged enterprise” and that it couldn’t reveal how a lot progress had been made however that they might be up to date by electronic mail or via the bureau’s sufferer notification system.

This information follows an announcement earlier this month that the Justice Division had opened a criminal investigation into the incident. This information got here after a Nationwide Transportation Security Board preliminary investigation discovered that the door plug had no bolts holding it in, inflicting it to fly off the aircraft shortly after takeoff. The DOJ is reportedly trying into whether or not or not Boeing correctly adopted the phrases of a settlement it reached after a collection of 737 MAX 8 crashes took the lives of 346 victims.

The settlement, which they reached in 2021 price Boeing $2.5 billion and got here with a situation that promised the feds would drop a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. cost after three years if Boeing complied with the phrases of the settlement. If the DOJ finds Boeing violated the phrases of the settlement, the aerospace large might be prosecuted on that unique cost. What the implications of being discovered responsible can be or whether or not the DOJ would really prosecute Boeing within the first place, nevertheless, nonetheless stays to be seen.

A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik.