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High School teacher finds Alaskan Airline door that blew off
FOX 5 NY's Sharon Crowley has the latest.
What landed in high school physics teacher Bob Sauer's backyard near Portland, Oregon turns out to be the missing door from an Alaska Airlines jet that blew off in-flight at 16-thousand feet.
Sauer said, "I was astounded to think of all the backyards in Portland--it was my backyard it landed in."
He searched for debris only after his neighbors started finding some.
He said, "there was something gleaming and white underneath the cedar trees along the back of the property line that wasn't normally there I thought maybe that's it."
Sure enough, this key piece of evidence in the NTSB’s investigation had landed in Bob's backyard.
He said "my heart started beating faster as I went back to investigate it turned out it was the door plug it looked like a piece from a plane it was curved like piece of fuselage and had and airplane style window in it and was painted white like an Alaska Airlines airplane."
Until the NTSB and FAA figure out why the door plug of the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 blew out those airplanes will remain grounded.
The NTSB chair appeared for a closed-door briefing with the senate commerce committee.
She says the group is investigating the door plug's entire production journey as well as what caused it to detach. Jennifer Homendy is the NTSB Chair.
She said "was there an overpressure event inside the aircraft? Uh, was there any sort of structural flexing of the aircraft itself at any points that may have, uh, had an impact on the plug itself?"
As for Bob Sauer, always the teacher, this became a real life lesson for his students who got to meet NTSB investigators.
He said "they were pretty astounded they wanted to get the whole story. They were also concerned I was going to put it on their final exams."