Alaska was the airline who had their door ripped off. A reasonable take is to expect them to want to ensure that things like that don't happen again. PR is an added bonus.
They also fired the mechanic that raised this issue before the accident. It could have been avoided if they had only listened to him.
It is indeed a bit ironic.
I don't think PR is an added bonus, I think it's the entire point.
If I were a PR person, thinking only about PR (not caring about anything else), the #1 thing that seems obvious is "what do we need to do to have these incidents stop occurring ASAP".
Or they could be just putting on a show like you're suggesting, but that would do a huge disservice from a PR perspective if that results in the underlying issues not being fixed.
"Door fell off airplane during flight" headlines a couple times a month would be some of the worst PR you could possibly have (with the exception of planes crashing, obviously even worse)
they've been through serious air disasters before and have scar tissue from it.
and if it is strictly a pr thing, the auditors go to boeing, take some pr photos, have a beer, and go home, then they deserve to fail.
not saying they’re completely guilty, but they do have some part of the fault in that incident.
I'm finding these type of apologists comments placing fault towards the airline really hard to sympathize with.
Airplanes fly around ALL THE TIME with equipment that isn’t working. They have a procedure for determining what is and isn’t necessary for a given flight both legally and by the airlines own standards. In this case it very much looks like the pressurization controller was a red herring.
It would be nice to get the black box data, but Alaska mishandled the box and allowed it to write over data from the flight in question. Oops.
What I have not heard is if the problems with the door plug are connected to the warnings.
Edit: If that warning was, in fact, an indication of the door plug problem then perhaps the reaction to that warning should be reviewed.