Science teacher finds missing piece of Boeing jet fuselage in his yard

Bob Sauer, flashlight in hand, went to his backyard in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, on Sunday evening to check if parts of the Alaska Airlines plane, which had lost part of its fuselage in mid-air, had landed nearby.

A neighbor had one with Mr. Sauer to check his property in Cedar Hills, Oregon, and said she had heard that a cell phone had been found nearby and had fallen from the plane.

Mr. Sauer soon noticed a white metal object leaning against the branch of a cedar tree. “My heart started beating a little faster,” he said in an interview Monday, “and I thought that was impossible.”

But it was true: Mr. Sauer, a science teacher at the Catlin Gabel School, a nearby private school, had found the center cabin door plug, which had been torn from the plane during the flight on Friday, in his yard.

He called the National Transportation Safety Board, which arrived at his home Monday morning, interviewed him for about 30 minutes and then removed the crucial piece of evidence from his property, he said. The board, he said, gave him a medallion decorated with an eagle to thank him for his efforts.

Door plugs are used to fill emergency exits that are not needed in aircraft configured with less than the maximum possible number of seats. The board said inside a statement on Monday that investigators were “currently examining the door plug” and planned to send it to an agency laboratory in Washington, DC for further testing.

The board shared photos on social media showing the door stuck in a thicket of branches before being inspected by officers on the ground.

Mr. Sauer, 64, who has taught science for four decades, said the discovery was the first thing he talked about in his astronomy class Monday morning.

He said the 50-foot-tall cedar trees in his yard had responded to the same scientific principle as an airbag, disrupting the door’s fall — an action known in physics as momentum.

“Impulse is what you do to change the momentum of something,” Mr. Sauer said. “You can do it with a large force in a short time, or with a smaller force over a longer period of time.”

He said an even more relevant lesson, besides the sheer physics of the drop, was that amazing things can happen.

“They mostly couldn’t believe it was happening in my backyard — to someone they knew,” Mr. Sauer said of his students.

Investigators are trying to determine why the plug was blown from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as the plane, which had taken off from Portland, reached an altitude of about 16,000 feet en route to Ontario, California.

None of the 171 passengers and six crew on board were seriously injured, but they were exposed to the howling winds from the hole in the fuselage as the plane returned to Portland, where it landed safely.

The episode led to the grounding of 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes in the United States and renewed concerns about the safety of the plane, which has had a troubled history.

In 2018, a Boeing 737 Max 8 operated as Lion Air Flight 610 crashed off the coast of Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. Less than five months later, in 2019, another Max 8 plane, operating as Ethiopia Flight 302, crashed shortly after leaving Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board.

Regulators around the world grounded the Max after the second crash. The Federal Aviation Administration cleared the plane to fly again in late 2020 after Boeing made changes to the plane, including a new automated system that played a role in both crashes. Boeing said in late 2019 that it had fired its CEO and agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the Justice Department in 2021.