An airplane left behind a trail of detritus violently sucked out of the cabin when a giant fucking hole opened in the fuselage this weekend. Thankfully nobody was injured, and the plane returned to Portland for an emergency landing, but little pieces of the flight are being uncovered all over the area, including two still-operational cell phones, and the giant hunk of plane.
When a nearly-full Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737 Max 9 left Portland, Ore. on Sunday morning, the passengers figured they’d make it to their destination, just like every other flight that left that day. About twenty minutes into the flight, however, the mid-cabin door plug got sucked right off the side of the plane, sucking a bunch of stuff out with it.
The door plug itself crash landed in the back yard of a Portland-area school teacher named Bob. The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that two cell phones from the flight have been recovered. Cuong Tran’s phone was recovered by Twitter user @SeanSafyre (above) still in airplane mode and without so much as a scratch. On the other hand, the phone’s charging cable didn’t fare so well, as one end of it was still plugged into the phone.
When the door plug failed, it sucked the main cabin door open at the front of the plane as well. Extreme wind caused damage to rows 1 through 4, 11 and 12, 25 through 27, and 31-33.
The plug was positioned in row 26, on the left side of the plane. No one was seated in the two seats adjacent to the door, seats 26A and 26B. The headrests on both of those seats are gone and the tray table on the back of 26A is missing. The seats have been sent to NTSB to be inspected.
I’m pretty sure my noise-cancelling earbuds would have kept me totally oblivious to the whole thing, and I wouldn’t have figured out anything was wrong until we disembarked back in Portland.