A Boeing 737 Max 9 earned its certificate of airworthiness on October 25, six days before it found its home with Alaska Airlines.

Over the next three months – before a terrifying midair blowout and emergency landing – it would fly more than 150 times. A few of those flights would tip off airline officials to a possible problem with the aircraft’s pressurization, a federal official later would say. It even would be restricted from traveling over the ocean – to Hawaii – in case such a warning appeared.

Still, nothing any ordinary passenger could notice would distinguish Friday’s Flight 1282 to Southern California, from any other. Nothing would signal the nationwide grounding of similar aircraft the plane would trigger just a few days into the new year. Indeed, nothing would foretell the terror this plane soon would hold in the sky above Portland, Oregon.