BY NBC NEWS
Finding a door-shaped fragment of a plane that was sent into the air on Friday night after it separated from its host aircraft took two days.
High school teacher Bob Sauer said that he hadn’t looked for the panel, also known as a door plug, in his lawn sooner. He said that a neighbor had advised him to check his property on Sunday, but he was slow to act and ended up using a flashlight to investigate his backyard that evening.
“It still didn’t seem very likely to me,” Portland, Oregon, resident Sauer said on Monday night in an interview with NBC News.
He had been following the news of the catastrophe that occurred on Friday, when a nearly full Boeing 737 Max 9 had its door plug blown out.
The pilots of Alaska Airlines were forced to make a safe emergency landing back at Portland International Airport after the crash revealed a sizable hole in the fuselage, according to the airline. There were no significant injuries recorded.
Sauer, a physics teacher, saw something in the midst of the trees he had planted 20 years before during his nightly hunt.
“I planted something gleaming and white against the back property wall underneath that line of cedar trees,” he said. That doesn’t belong there, I thought. That isn’t typical.
His heart pounding, he approached and saw what it was. Nestled among the branches that seemed to have stopped their fall was the door plug.
“It was unbelievable that that thing that people had been looking for all weekend happened to be in my yard,” Sauer said.
When Sauer contacted the Portland National Transportation Safety Board, its investigators requested a picture from him, despite their initial skepticism due to the fact that an earlier discovery had just been a fluorescent light bulb. That verified that it was the most sought-after section of airplane fuselage in America.
Early on Monday morning, NTSB agents arrived at Sauer’s residence to seize the panel.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy Portland said in an interview with NBC News earlier on Monday, “We picked it up this morning, brought it back to begin the examination of the door plug itself in relation really to the plug surround structure.”
According to her, it was being transported to the agency’s laboratory for a more in-depth, microscopic examination of its components, fasteners, and state.
The door stopper, she said, detonated and caused the compartment to depressurize explosively, much as a cork does on sparkling wine.
According to the NTSB, it occurred at 5:12 p.m. in Portland, or around six minutes after departure from Portland International Airport. The Alaska Airlines aircraft was headed to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, but it was only at 14,800 feet in the air.
There were just a few vacant seats on the plane, including the two closest to the door plug, as it traveled to Ontario, California, carrying 171 passengers and 6 staff members. According to Homendy, two chairs’ frames were torqued, and the headrests flew out.
Portland door plugs are used to seal the openings in the fuselage where emergency exits would be located in the event that the aircraft could carry more people.
The panels are sealed and secured in place by specialized fasteners, as is the usual pressurization of the cabin, which keeps aircraft livable and supplies oxygen at such high altitudes, in part.
It is unknown what caused the door plug to burst out in the Portland region.
“A really, really key piece of Portland evidence,” according to Homendy, who described the door plug in an interview with NBC News on Monday.
Anyone who found the door plug was urged by the NTSB to report its whereabouts and provide images of it to the organization. The panel fell in the Cedar Hills suburb, around seven miles west of Portland’s city center, as the NTSB had projected.
Homendy said that two smartphones that were possibly owned by passengers were discovered close by.
At a press conference in Portland on Monday night, Portland Homendy stated, “I want to start by thanking Bob,” and she also expressed her thanks to the neighborhood.
She said, “Bob seemed to be a star with all of his students today.”
According to Portland Sauer, he used the experience to teach the pupils some basic physics concepts. However, he said that Monday in school, more time was spent talking about his celebrity.
“By the time I got to school,” he said, “pretty much the whole school knew about it.”
According to Homendy, the organization offered to send representatives to Sauer’s class to give a talk on how the NTSB carries out these kinds of investigations in an effort to make travel safer.
However, Sauer claimed that he declined the offer, saying, “I would have tried to take them up on that if it wasn’t finals week.”
