Bob Sauer grasps the physics of how a door blown out of an Alaska Airlines flight landed unscathed in his backyard earlier this month.
“I think one of the reasons was that the door came down through my trees in the backyard. They are cedar trees,” Mr. Sauer, 64, a high school science teacher at Caitlin Gabel in Portland, told The Epoch Times.
Cedar trees, he said, have “very bendable branches, and so they would have softened the fall quite a bit.” There are other factors in the air, too.
Why or how a mechanism consisting of 12 stop fittings could fail, causing a panel next to a row of passengers to blow out of the airplane, is being investigated by members of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
Similar to how a bank vault works, those bolt-like fittings should have held the door plug (as the removable panels are called) securely to the rest of the aircraft.
What happened instead was a disaster in row 26 of Alaska Airlines 1282, shortly after takeoff at 5 p.m., on January 5. The flight departed from Portland, Oregon, bound for Ontario, California, and was carrying 177 passengers and crew along with 18,900 pounds of fuel.
Passengers reported hearing a loud “boom” and imagined the worst. The sudden depressurization as a panel inside the plane blew out at an altitude of 16,000 feet caused loose articles, a table tray, and a headrest to get sucked out along with the shirt off a young boy’s back, NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy told reporters.
The Boeing 737 MAX 9 turned back and made an emergency landing.
“It was on the news all weekend, I knew it happened in Portland,” Mr. Sauer, who lives in West Haven-Sylvan neighborhood, told the newspaper. “But it didn’t occur to me that it would be anywhere near me.”
On Sunday, a neighbor called him and mentioned how cell phones falling from the air had been found close by his yard.
It was 8 p.m. and dark by then. “I took the flashlight out, and there was nothing in the front yard,” he said. The tall cedar trees in the backyard that he and his children had planted 20 years ago cast dark shadows.
“In the flashlight beam I saw something white and gleaming underneath the row of cedar trees at the back of the property,” Mr. Sauer said, adding that this “was very unusual, there shouldn’t have been anything like that back there.”
He said, “As I got closer to it, my heart started beating faster.”
A telltale airplane-style window and the object’s distinct curvature—like an airplane’s fuselage—meant only one thing. “It was indeed the part,” he said. “It was incredible to me that this thing I’d been hearing about all weekend had fallen in my backyard.”
A piece that weighed approximately 65 pounds, the science teacher guesses, and measured 4 by 2 feet had landed without any noticeable signs of impact on the ground—probably because the trees acted as a cushion, he surmised.
NTSB investigators were already searching for the missing door plug. They had received a report from someone who found something earlier that day but, upon inspection, the team determined it was just a fluorescent light fixture.
When Mr. Sauer called in his discovery to the NTSB’s 24-hour hotline in Washington D.C. and sent pictures, they confirmed it was the missing airplane part.
An NTSB spokesperson heard the news and ran back to a press conference to announce that a teacher named Bob, from Portland, had found the door.
“I started getting emails and texts with people figuring out that I must be the Bob,” the teacher told The Epoch Times.
At 7 a.m. on Monday, an NTSB crew showed up at his house and, with marked enthusiasm, an inspector photographed the panel with his cell phone. They then loaded it into an SUV and drove off, intending to ship it to a laboratory in D.C.
On arriving at school later that morning, Mr. Sauer was bombarded with questions from colleagues and students. “Are you the Bob?” they asked. He spent the first 15 minutes of an astronomy class retelling the story of his aeronautical finding.
He also explained some of the physics of how it happened. The plane’s airspeed, wind, and air resistance were all factors that played into it. He learned from the NTSB crew that it hadn’t fallen directly below where the plane was flying but had traveled some distance.
It would have reached “terminal velocity”—the maximum speed attainable by an object with drag and buoyancy counteracting gravity—allowing it to make a relatively soft landing in his backyard.
Had it struck the house, there likely would have been a sizable hole, he supposed.
The impact it had on his popularity was quite a different story. He received dozens of requests for interviews from as far away as Finland, France, and Lithuania, he said.
“One of my colleagues said it’s been on the news in the Czech Republic,” Mr. Sauer told the newspaper. “It’s been all over.”
But besides being a teachable physics moment for his students, and a chance to get them excited about what the Transportation Safety Board does, there were other benefits: connecting with old acquaintances.
“Also I’ve heard from people that I lost track of a long time ago in high school,” he said. “So that’s been delightful.”
