UPDATED 1/8, 8:00 p.m. ET: The missing door that detached from Alaska Airlines flight AS1282 has been recovered.
According to KPTV, the National Transportation Safety Bureau announced on Saturday that they were searching for the airplane’s “plug door,” or a panel that can be opened like a door from outside of the plane.
The panel was discovered on Sunday evening by a school teacher who found it in his backyard at his Cedar Hills residence and sent officials photos to verify it. The neighborhood is located in western Portland and is under a flight path.
NTSB then recovered the plug door on Monday and said it will ship it to Washington, D.C. for further examination, per KPTV.
Karen Donahue, a longtime resident of the neighborhood where the door landed, told the news station that the ordeal made her “nervous.”
“I hadn’t realized that we were part of the story, really,” said Donahue. “We’ve always known that we’re in a flight path, and now it kind of makes me even a little more nervous when I go to bed at night. I had no idea that a door might be flying through my roof.”
She continued, “A piece of fuselage that fell out of the sky could’ve hit a home, could’ve hit a car, could’ve hit somebody walking, could’ve landed in the middle of the freeway. It could’ve been a disaster. It does make me wonder about death from above.”
See original story below.
Someone has found an iPhone that fell from the Alaska Airlines flight that made the news after a section of the plane blew out mid-air.
As shared by Senathan Bates, who later revealed that he's since agreed to an interview about his discovery, a phone belonging to one of the passengers was found on the side of the road. "Found an iPhone on the side of the road... Still in airplane mode with half a battery and open to a baggage claim for #AlaskaAirlines ASA1282 Survived a 16,000 foot drop perfectly in tact!" wrote Bates, who lists his location on his profile as Vancouver, Washington. "When I called it in, Zoe at @NTSB said it was the SECOND phone to be found. No door yet."
As he added in a second tweet, a broken charger can be seen connected to the bottom of the still-functioning phone. "There was a broken-off charger plug still inside it! Thing got *yanked* out the door," he wrote while apologizing for not getting a better picture before handing it off to the National Transporation Safety Board.
In a video originally shared on TikTok, he explained that he stumbled across the phone after the NTSB put out a call to help recover any missing pieces of the plane or any missing belongings. "I was, of course, a little skeptical at first, I was thinking this could just be thrown out of a car or someone dropped it while they were driving," he continued. "But I found it, it was still pretty clean. No scratches on it, sitting under a bush. It didn't have a screen lock on it."
The Alaska Airlines flight was headed from Portland International Airport to Ontario, California on Friday, January 5 when it was forced to make an emergency landing after a section of the plane blew out. Photos and videos of the plane, still in the air, showed a large chunk of the plane missing as its passengers miraculously remained calm. Alaska Airlines ordered all Boeing 737 Max 9 planes to be grounded for inspection following the incident.
CNN reports that a Portland schoolteacher named Bob helped recover the fuselage door plug after it landed in his yard. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy announced the recovery at a news conference. "It’s fortunate that nobody died and there were not more serious injuries," she told CNN.
