This is the second story in a row involving an Alaska Airline plane headed to Seattle. Although almost guaranteed to be a coincidence, it is interesting.
This time, the flight wasn’t headed out of Ontario, California, but Burbank, California. Although there were no problems with the flight itself, a detail-oriented passenger happened to look out the window to see a message scrawled along a portion of the wing. The note read simply “We know about this” and appeared along a wing section that did not seem to be in the best shape.
The passenger snapped a photo and it quickly went viral once it was put online. It turns out that the apparent “safety issue” was more innocuous than it might have seemed to the untrained eye. A spokesperson for Alaska Airlines said that the scrawl was the result of a maintenance technician telling crews that an appropriate repair had been made to the right wing’s corner flap. The message mistakenly didn’t get removed before the flight, an issue that was corrected once Alaska learned of the error.
A commenter to the originally posted photo who claims to work for Delta said that ground personnel typically make notes of apparent damage and that such a notation would prevent numerous erroneous reports from being filed.