An emergency slide that fell off a Delta Airlines Boeing 767 jetliner on Friday was found on Sunday near the Belle Harbor beachside house of a lawyer whose firm is suing Boeing over safety issues.
The rubber emergency exit slide was found six miles southeast of JFK International Airport.
“We are right on the beach and I saw it was sitting on the breakers,” Jake Bissell-Linsk told the New York Post.
Officials had been looking for the missing slide since Friday morning
Mr. Bissell-Linsk noticed the deflated yellow chute around noon while looking out from his window.
“I didn’t want to touch it but I got close enough to get a close look at it,” he said. As he approached the slide to snap some pictures, it appeared tangled but intact, half floating in the water.
Mr. Bissell-Linsk’s neighbor called the FAA, but the agency is closed on Sundays, so he reported the finding to Delta Airlines.
A crew from the airliner arrived several hours later, at around 5 p.m. They fished the slide out of the water and loaded it in the back of a pickup truck.
“I see this Delta truck pull up and watch them pull it out of the water,” Mr. Bissell-Linsk said. “It took them about 10 minutes.”
He hopes aviation authorities can figure out why the chute fell off the plane.
“I think the slide should be handed over to whoever is investigating the incident,” he said.
Mr. Bissell-Linsk told the Post that he is a partner at law firm Labaton Keller Sucharow, which sued Boeing on Jan. 30 in Virginia federal court after a side panel blew out of an Alaska Air Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliner on Jan. 5.
“Our case is all about safety issues at Boeing, and this slide is literally right in front of my house,” Mr. Bissell-Linsk said, not failing to notice the irony.
Labaton Keller Sucharow is currently suing the airplane manufacturer on behalf of a number of stock-owners who accuse Boeing of making false and misleading statements in 2019 when it said it was laser-focused on safety.
The Alaska Air blowout shattered the airplane builder’s already ailing reputation, causing its stock to pummel by nearly 50 percent in the first quarter of 2024.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), who investigated the incident, soon found that inadequate repairs may have caused the panel to come off mid-air.
Boeing failed to produce logs of the suspicious repairs, and a congressional probe was launched. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also opened separate criminal investigations related to the incident.
Earlier this month, Boeing whistleblowers lambasted the company in Congress.
“They are putting out defective airplanes,” Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpour told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on April 17, alleging that Boeing was taking “shortcuts” to ramp up production.
“Every person stepping aboard a Boeing airplane is at risk,” former Boeing manager Ed Pierson said, who also criticized federal agencies for having become “lazy, complacent, and reactive” in their oversight responsibilities.
