Alaska Airlines pilot thought passengers were being sucked out of the plane when the door panel of a Boeing 737 flew out in mid-flight

Emily Wiprud didn't know exactly what happened, but the Alaska Airlines pilot was sure something went terribly wrong when Flight 1282 left Portland on January 5.

“The first sign was an explosion in my ears and then a whooshing sound,” Wiprud, an Alaska Air pilot, told CBS News of the flight that lost an outer panel at 16,000 feet and forced an emergency landing. “My body was thrown forward and there was also a loud bang… The door to the cockpit was open. I saw hoses hanging out of the cabin.”

In the chaos that saw the Boeing 737 Max 9 lose a large panel called a door stopper, her headset flew out of the plane, as did some passengers' cell phones. She looked around and saw “empty seats and injuries” and feared that some of the passengers had also been thrown from the plane.

Wiprud said she could remember looking down the aisle of the plane and seeing rows of passengers staring back at her, some of them injured.

“I didn't know there was a hole in the plane until we landed,” she added. “I knew something had gone catastrophically wrong.”

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) later found that the plane was missing screws that were meant to secure the door stopper, a panel that covers the slots in the fuselage that serve as emergency exits, turning them into normal-looking windows for passengers.

Miraculously, the plane was able to make an emergency landing in Portland with all 177 passengers and crew on board.

The Alaska accident prompted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to temporarily remove all Boeing 737 Max 9s with the same door stopper from the market. This was the beginning of a series of scandals and problems at the renowned aerospace company, which was soon investigated by the FAA, DOJ and FBI.

The subsequent investigation revealed a number of questionable practices, including a now-discontinued method called “traveled work,” in which components with known defects were brought onto the production line and repaired during assembly.

A number of whistleblowers came forward claiming there were further quality problems on Boeing's production lines, and the company's CEO announced his resignation at the end of the year.

In July, Boeing pleaded guilty to misleading regulators in the certification of the 737 Max and agreed to pay a fine of at least $243.6 million in a trial related to the 2018 and 2019 Max crashes that killed 346 people.

In space, two NASA astronauts who traveled to the International Space Station on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft in June will be stuck at the research station until early next year after encountering mechanical problems on the trip into space.

To make matters worse, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunisa “Suni” Williams will fly back to Earth on a ship operated by Boeing’s competitor SpaceX.