The New York Times reported that the plane was scheduled for a maintenance check over ongoing concerns, but Alaska Airlines chose to allow flights to go ahead.
This is pretty common - planes fly all the time with broken things or with needed inspections or particular part replacements on the schedule needing to be done. Otherwise like 50% of them would be out of service at any given time having some non safety critical thing done to them. There’s a set of guidelines for what you need to fix right away or what you can mark “INOP” with a big tag and keep flying and on what timeframe the INOP thing needs to be fixed if it’s that option.
The issue is you need to have detailed understanding of what’s going on with the plane in order for that to be a safe thing to do. If there’s stuff that’s wrong with the plane that just never got caught in inspection so that no one knows that e.g. bolts are missing and part of the fuselage might explode off the aircraft at any time, then it’s gonna be hard to prioritize whether some problem you’re experiencing is a big deal or not.
This is pretty common - planes fly all the time with broken things or with needed inspections or particular part replacements on the schedule needing to be done. Otherwise like 50% of them would be out of service at any given time having some non safety critical thing done to them. There’s a set of guidelines for what you need to fix right away or what you can mark “INOP” with a big tag and keep flying and on what timeframe the INOP thing needs to be fixed if it’s that option.
The issue is you need to have detailed understanding of what’s going on with the plane in order for that to be a safe thing to do. If there’s stuff that’s wrong with the plane that just never got caught in inspection so that no one knows that e.g. bolts are missing and part of the fuselage might explode off the aircraft at any time, then it’s gonna be hard to prioritize whether some problem you’re experiencing is a big deal or not.