BEAVERTON, Ore. — In the days after Alaska Airlines flight 1282 was forced to turn back to Portland when a door plug broke off from the plane during its ascent, residents in the Cedar Mill area north of Beaverton have discovered multiple objects that fell from the aircraft during the explosive depressurization including a headrest, the door plug itself and two cell phones apparently belonging to passengers on the flight.
The door plug, a piece of the plane that will be key to the investigation of what happened on the Boeing 737 MAX 9, was found in the yard of a science teacher at Catlin Gabel School, a private school in Southwest Portland.
"I wasn't expecting to find it," said Bob Sauer from his home on Monday afternoon.
He said a friend called him Sunday afternoon suggesting he check his property after the National Transportation Safety Board announced plane debris may be in the Washington County area and asked the public for help locating it. Sauer searched his backyard Sunday night.
"It was dark by that time and I went out, got my flashlight and went around to the back," he said. "In the flashlight beam I could see that there was something gleaming white underneath the trees that isn't normally there."
The door plug was intact, on the ground. Tall cedar trees line the back of Sauer's home, and the white piece of fuselage had come down one of the trees and was leaning up against a branch.
"That wasn't there before, I bet that's what I'm looking for," Sauer said, recounting what came to his mind when he spotted it. "My heart started beating faster because I thought, 'Oh my goodness, people have been looking for this all weekend and it looks like it's in my backyard.'"
Sauer called the NTSB, which sent a team of investigators to his home on Monday morning to recover the door. It will be sent to the NTSB Materials Laboratory in Washington, DC for further examination.
A headrest — likely from the seat closest to the blown-out door plug, based on photos and video from inside the plane — was found on a property next door to where the door fell.
Diane Flaherty told KGW she found the headrest on her back patio on Sunday morning, and her initial thought was that one of her dogs must have put it there.
"I'm like, 'that's weird, where did the dogs find a headrest? And where did it come from?'" she said.
After picking it up and looking closer, she thought it looked like the headrests she'd seen on an Alaska Airlines flight she took about two weeks ago — they had stood out to her because they were a new design that made her realize she was probably flying on a newer plane.
She said she didn't initially think it could be from flight 1282, because she thought the incident had happened too far away. But then on Monday morning a friend emailed her a screenshot of the NTSB's search area for debris, and she realized her neighborhood was right in the middle of it.
"I'm glad it was just something soft coming into my backyard, versus the door, or a computer travelling 500 miles per hour from outer space and hitting my roof, or something like that," she said.
Less than a half mile away, a man named Sean Bates said he found one of the cell phones along Barnes Road over the weekend, a short distance west of Providence St. Vincent Hospital. Bates said he had heard on the news that the NTSB was asking people in the Beaverton area to be on the lookout for any debris that may have fallen from the plane, and he and a couple friends in the area went out to look around.
"Some other people over here did have a drone looking around, but I was just going to take a walk around, see if I could find a Sky Mall (magazine), a little seat cushion or something like that," he said.
While walking along Barnes Road, he spotted a cell phone lying face-up in some bushes a short distance from the edge of the road.
"At first I was skeptical, of course," he said. "I thought, you know, maybe this one just fell off while someone was jogging. But when I picked it up it was in airplane mode."
The screen wasn't locked, he said, and the first thing he saw was a baggage claim receipt for Alaska Airlines flight 1282. Sean said he called the NTSB and was told that it was the second phone found — investigators had just turned up another one nearby a short time earlier.
Bates said he thought the search zone was precise enough that he had a reasonably good chance of finding something, but he added that the odds of the phone surviving the fall and him finding it were still "astronomical."
"Probably the number one comment I get is 'Sure, I drop my phone 5 feet off the table and it cracks, and this phone lands out of an airplane from 16,000 feet up and it's just fine,'" he said, laughing.
Bates said he handed the phone over to the NTSB, but he assumes the agency will pass it back to its owner once it's done whatever checks are necessary for the investigation.