The terrifying minutes on board Flight 1282

It felt like an explosion. Then the plane rattled, the oxygen masks fell and the lights flickered. A white vapor rushed through the cabin. Some people shouted. Others were disoriented.

Thus began the harrowing minutes aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, when a door-sized section at the back of the plane blew off Friday evening ten minutes after it took off from Portland, Oregon, initially confusing some passengers and others were completely confused. terrified.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘I’m going to die,’” said Vi Nguyen, 22, a passenger from Portland.

Nicholas Hoch, 33, was sitting in 12A, a window seat at the front of the Boeing 737 Max 9. He tried to remain calm. Still, he started typing text messages for his mother and girlfriend. Something was wrong on the plane, he told them, adding, “I love you guys.”

The flight, with 171 passengers and six crew members on board, started off in an ordinary manner. En route to Ontario, California, the flight was initially delayed by about 20 minutes because of defrosting, said Mr. Hoch, an architect, who was flying to visit his girlfriend’s family.

He spent the delay reaching his pre-flight comfort zone, putting on his noise-canceling headphones and listening to a podcast about Tokyo ahead of his trip to Japan in a few days.

Flight 1282 departed Portland at 5:07 p.m Flight conscious, a flight tracking website. He climbed to about 16,000 feet and traveled about 440 miles per hour.

Then came the boom. For others a bang. Vicki Kreps, 56, a nurse from Vancouver, Washington, who was sitting in row 19 with her two grandchildren, Brady, 7, and Brynlee, 5, said they could feel a distinct shift forward in their seats, followed by the decompression of the air in their ears. She helped put on Brynlee’s oxygen mask, while Brady put on his own.

“We definitely felt like we were declining rapidly,” Ms. Kreps said.

Evan Smith, a 72-year-old attorney, said he started seeing “dark, smoky stuff” swirling around the cabin.

Mr. Hoch looked up and saw passengers’ hair being blown back. “The best way I can describe it is like puncturing a CO2 canister and the vapor that comes out of the canister,” he said.

“But we were on that bus.”

A moment of hysteria broke out as a few people stood up, pointing and shouting that there was a hole in the back.

It was in row 26, aviation authorities said at a press conference on Saturday. There was no one sitting at the window and middle seat. But after the “rapid decompression” of the cabin, the headrests of two nearby seats were gone, as was the back of one.

Authorities investigating are still looking for the missing part, which they called a door plug because it covers what is sometimes used as an emergency exit in other models of the plane. On Saturday, they said they believed the door plug was located somewhere in a neighborhood outside Portland near Interstate 217.

After it exploded, a woman walked to the front of the plane to say someone’s shirt had been ripped off, Mr. Hoch said. He also said people told him they had lost belongings, such as their phones or earbuds.

Flight attendants made announcements asking passengers to sit down and stay seated. But Elizabeth Le, 20, a friend of Ms. Nguyen, said they were difficult to hear because of the wind whipping through the plane.

Confusion spread through the cabin, with those in the front unaware of what was happening behind them, Mr Hoch said.

Ms Le said a boy and his mother were sitting near the missing section. Flight attendants helped them move to the other side of the plane a few minutes later, she said. The boy appeared to have lost his shirt and his skin looked red and irritated, she added.

“It was horrifying, honestly,” Ms Le said. “I almost collapsed, but I realized I had to stay calm.”

Mr Hoch said he felt a range of emotions. He kept his head turning and looked back and forth all the time. The woman next to him was in tears. She asked him to hold her hand, he said, and he did.

But overall, everyone was relatively “eeriely calm,” Mr. Hoch said, although he added that some were “silently panicking.”

Mr. Smith, who was returning to his home in Murrieta, California, after visiting his daughter and son-in-law in Portland, said his previous experiences as an officer in the military police taught him the importance of keeping a cool head. He felt the plane was durable enough to land.

The flight circled back to Portland. “The plane was stable. It didn’t shake, didn’t make any strange maneuvers, it just flew steadily,” he said. “At that moment I was sure the plane was fine and that we would land safely.”

Ms Kreps said the flight crew helped people stay calm. “I am extremely impressed with Alaska and how they have handled this situation,” she said.

Passengers said as soon as the plane landed, at 5:27 a.m., paramedics came on board. A man sitting in the row directly behind the hole said he hurt his foot but was not seriously injured.

In a video Ms. Le took of the flight, passengers can be heard clapping after landing.

“Oh my God,” someone says in the video.

John Yoon, Victoria Kim, Mayor of Orlando, Niraj Chokshi, Mark Walker And Johnny Diaz reporting contributed. Susan Beachy research contributed.