Incident on board the Boeing 737 Max: a door torn off in flight was found in the garden

She didn’t fly far. The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said on Sunday night that a “missing key component” of the Boeing 737 MAX 9, which was forced to make an emergency landing on Friday after an emergency door was torn off mid-flight, had been found on Sunday. .

The sign, weighing about 60 pounds and covering a fire escape, was discovered by a Portland schoolteacher identified only as “Bob.” He found it in his garden in the Cedar Hills area, about ten kilometers as the crow flies from the airport.

“Bob took two photos where you can see the outside of the door panel, the white parts. We don’t see anything else, but we’re going to take the panel and start analyzing it,” said Jennifer Homendy, president of the NTSB, during a press conference. “Our construction team will want to look at everything on the door, all the components, to see marks, to look at paint transfer, to look at what shape the door was in when it was found. It can tell them a lot about what happened,” she said.

“Detonation”

Late Friday afternoon, an Alaska Airlines flight that had just taken off from Portland International Airport (Oregon, northwestern United States) bound for Ontario, California, had to turn around when the plane’s gate opened and separated from the cabin. According to the NTSB, 171 passengers and 6 crew members were then at an altitude of almost 5000 m. The depressurized plane quickly returned to Portland, with no injuries reported. Not a single passenger was sitting next to the torn off door; the headrests of two seats and the soft part of the back of the third were retracted.

The pilots reported “hearing an explosion,” Homendy said, as the window came off. The laminated checklist flew away and the co-pilot lost his helmet. “Communication was a major problem… It was described as chaos,” she said. The cockpit voice recorder did not record any data because it automatically overwrites it after two hours, Jennifer Homendy said. The NTSB chairman called for retrofitting existing aircraft with recorders capable of recording 25 hours of data.

Homendy said the auto boost warning light illuminated on the same Alaska Airlines plane on Dec. 7 and on Jan. 3 and 4, the day before the crash, but the connection between those incidents and Friday’s accident has not yet been determined. Boeing handed over the aircraft to the company on October 31.

Alaska Airlines, United Airlines, Turkish Airlines and other safety agencies around the world have grounded some versions of the Boeing 737 MAX 9 pending inspections. Alaska Airlines canceled 170 flights on Sunday and another 60 on Monday. United canceled 230 flights Sunday, or 8% of its scheduled departures. Boeing’s CEO invited his employees to a safety meeting on Tuesday at the manufacturer’s plant in Washington state.

This weekend, two more people reported finding cellphones that appeared to have fallen from a plane, including one that landed in someone’s yard and another that was found on the side of the road.