DALLAS — An American Airlines flight bound for California faced an unusual technical hiccup over the weekend when the pilots found themselves unexpectedly locked out of their own cockpit, forcing a maintenance worker to scale the aircraft and crawl in through a side window.
The incident occurred on Sunday morning at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) aboard American Airlines Flight 2140, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 scheduled for a 10:15 a.m. departure to Monterey Regional Airport.
Passengers were already heading down the jet bridge to board the aircraft when the pre-boarding process ground to a sudden halt.
“I was halfway down the bridge for pre-board when the pilot comes out and says to turn around and go back to the gate because they got locked out of the cockpit,” one passenger later recounted on Reddit.
Because reinforced commercial cockpit doors are strictly designed with post-9/11 security protocols to keep people out, there was no simple way to open the door from the terminal side once it latched. Airline staff confirmed to passengers that the situation wasn’t a matter of lost keys or an electronic security failure; rather, the heavy mechanical door latch had simply jammed shut while the flight deck was unoccupied.
With no options left on the inside, the airline called in a maintenance crew to execute a dramatic, albeit standard, backup plan: using the 737’s built-in external window release (a small flush panel located on the nose of the aircraft) a technician managed to unseal the co-pilot’s side window from the outside. Slipping through the open window and into the flight deck, the mechanic was able to manually release the jammed internal lock.
Once inside, technicians thoroughly re-lubricated the sticky latch mechanism and tested the door multiple times to ensure it wouldn’t seize up mid-flight.
The captain later made light of the awkward delay during his pre-departure announcements. According to passengers, the pilot thanked everyone for their patience with the “sticky door,” joking that the maintenance crew had “lubed it up real good” so they could safely get underway.
The aircraft (registration N315VC) finally pushed back from the gate and took off at 12:21 p.m., arriving in Monterey roughly two hours behind schedule.
