Man called Bob finds missing Boeing part in his garden after Alaska Airlines blowout | US News

The missing part of a Boeing plane which blew off in midair has been found in the back garden of a teacher called Bob.

The Alaska Airlines plane had departed from Portland, Oregon on Friday and was due to fly to Ontario, Canada when a piece of the fuselage flew off at 16,000ft.

Boeing has grounded 171 of the 218 737 Max 9 jets following the incident while they investigate – as some of the planes have been returned to the air on Sunday after finding ‘no concerning findings’.

The missing part of the plane, the door plug, was found in a teacher’s back garden. No other details have been given about Bob, who beat the authorities to locate the faulty piece of fuselage.

Investigators will examine the plug, which is 26 by 48 inches and weighs 63 pounds, for signs of how it broke free.

Following the blowout, plane landed back in Portland safely and none of its 177 passengers and crew were injured.

Passengers described the hole in the plane as being ‘as wide as a refrigerator’.

Jennifer Homendy, of the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said pilots had reported pressurisation warning lights on three earlier flights in the days before Friday’s incident – but it’s not clear if these warnings are linked.

The plane involved was not being used for journeys to Hawaii, after Alaska Airlines restricted the aircraft from long flights over water so that the plane ‘could return very quickly to an airport’ if the warning light reappeared.

Ms Homendy described the event as ‘very chaotic’, adding that no information was available to read from the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved before the two-hour mark and it was recorded over.

Describing the incident, she said the explosive rush of air damaged several rows of seats and pulled insulation from the walls, while the cockpit door flew open and banged into a lavatory door.

The force ripped the headset off the co-pilot and the captain lost part of her headset. A quick reference checklist kept within easy reach of the pilots flew out of the open cockpit.

The Max is the newest version of Boeing’s venerable 737, a twin-engine, single-aisle plane frequently used on US domestic flights. The plane went into service in May 2017.

Two Max 8 jets crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. All Max 8 and Max 9 planes were grounded worldwide for nearly two years until Boeing made changes to an automated flight control system implicated in the crashes.

The Max has been plagued by other issues, including manufacturing flaws, concern about overheating that led the FAA to tell pilots to limit use of an anti-ice system, and a possible loose bolt in the rudder system.

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