An emergency slide that fell off of a Delta passenger jet shortly after take-off last week reportedly turned up two days later outside the home of a lawyer whose firm is coincidently suing the Boeing plane manufacturer over safety issues.
Jake Bissell-Linsk, whose firm filed suit against Boeing after one of its planes lost a door plug mid-air back in January, said he discovered the deflated slide washed up outside his oceanfront home near New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sunday.
“I didn’t want to touch it but I got close enough to get a close look at it,” he told The New York Post of the bizarre discovery along the shore of Belle Harbor, Queens.
Photos taken by Katie McFadden, managing editor of the local weekly Rockaway Times newspaper, show the yellow and gray slide material flopped upon some rocks before it was carried away by workers. Bissell-Linsk told the Post that it took about 10 minutes for them to haul it away.
Delta confirmed to HuffPost the slide’s retrieval.
“As indicated on Friday, we will fully cooperate with all relevant investigations,” a spokesperson for the airliner said in an email Tuesday.
The Los Angeles-bound Delta flight, carrying 183 people, declared an in-flight emergency after a vibration was detected shortly after takeoff on Friday. The plane safely returned to the airport, where the right wing’s slide panel was discovered to be open, according to a preliminary report by the Federal Aviation Administration and an emergency slide had fallen out of the plane.
“As nothing is more important than the safety of our customers and people, Delta flight crews enacted their extensive training and followed procedures to return to JFK. We appreciate their professionalism and our customers’ patience for the delay in their travels,” Delta said in an earlier statement.
Bissell-Linsk’s law office, Labaton Keller Sucharow, filed a securities class action lawsuit against Boeing in January, accusing the company of failing to disclose to shareholders that it has been prioritizing profits over safety in its production of commercial aircraft like the 737 Max 9. Those airliners were grounded in the U.S. earlier this year after the January door plug incident, as well as other inflight scares.
Boeing’s greed has resulted in “a heightened risk of manufacturing flaws that could render the Company’s new airplanes unsafe,” the law firm alleges.
The case has been consolidated with similar lawsuits, and is expected to be amended within the next two months, Bissell-Linsk told the Post.
“We haven’t decided if the slide is relevant to our case,” he added.