http://avherald.com/h?article=50570f7f&opt=0Not one, but two tail scrapes ! The plane audio isn't the best, hard to hear the planes as they were on the ground, trying to clean that up.
Just glad Alaska Air figured it out.
An Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 MAX, registration N941AK performing flight AS-801 from Seattle,WA to Kona,HI (USA), departed Seattle's runway 16L when upon rotation the flight crew noticed a bump and cabin crew heard scratching noises at the back. The aircraft stopped the climb at about 14000 feet and returned to Seattle for a safe landing on runway 16L about 40 minutes after departure.
About 6 minutes after that incident another Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-900, registration N468AS performing flight AS-887 from Seattle,WA to Honolulu,HI (USA), departed Seattle's runway 16L, upon rotation that flight crew also noticed a bump and cabin crew alerted the flight crew to scratching noises from the back of the aircraft. The aircraft stopped the climb at about 3000 feet and returned to Seattle for a safe landing on runway 16L about 20 minutes after departure.
Alaska Airlines immediately stopped all departures all around their network concluding that two such occurrence within 6 minutes were not normal. Flight operations quickly recognized that due to a software bug wrong takeoff data were transmitted to the flight crews. A work around was worked out, and flights resumed after about 22 minutes.
N941AK was able to depart again with a delay of about 4 hours and reached Kona with a delay of about 4.5 hours, N468AS remained on the ground for about 30 hours before resuming service.