PORTLAND, Ore. — Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) visited the classroom of Bob Sauer on Tuesday afternoon. Sauer is the Portland science teacher who found in his yard the door plug that blew out of a Boeing 747 MAX 9 mid-flight.
In a tweet, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said they "hope to inspire the next generation of NTSB employees" during the visit. Sauer teaches at Catlin Gabel School, a private school in Southwest Portland.
On Friday, Alaska Airlines flight 1282 was forced to turn back and make an emergency landing at Portland International Airport when a door plug broke off from the plane during its ascent.
After the NTSB announced that plane debris might be in the Washington County area and asked people to locate it, a friend phoned Sauer, who lives in the Cedar Mill area north of Beaverton, and told him to check his property. He went into his backyard Sunday night with a flashlight. Sauer said he wasn't expecting to find anything.
"It was dark by that time and I went out, got my flashlight and went around to the back," he said. "In the flashlight beam I could see that there was something gleaming white underneath the trees that isn't normally there."
The door plug was intact, on the ground. Tall cedar trees line the back of Sauer's home, and the white piece of fuselage had come down on one of the trees and was leaning up against a branch.
"That wasn't there before, I bet that's what I'm looking for," Sauer said, recounting what came to his mind when he spotted it. "My heart started beating faster because I thought, 'Oh my goodness, people have been looking for this all weekend and it looks like it's in my backyard.'"
Sauer called the NTSB, which sent a team of investigators to his home on Monday morning to recover the door. It will be sent to the NTSB Materials Laboratory in Washington, D.C. for further examination.
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