Alaska Airlines Flight 1282's missing door plug and two passenger cellphones are found near Portland after a terrifying explosion at 16,000 feet that sucked out belongings

The missing door plug and two cellphones belonging to passengers on the Alaska Airlines flight that experienced a door slam 16,000 feet above Oregon on Friday have been located.

One of the cellphones, an iPhone, was found by video game designer Sean Bates, who said he picked it up while out for a walk. In a series of posts on

Bates added that when he contacted the National Transportation and Safety Bureau, he was told this was the second such phone found. In a subsequent post, Bates showed that the charging plug was still in the phone, indicating that it had been pulled out.

The door plug was later found after being recovered from the backyard of a suburban Portland home. NTSB Chairman Jennifer Homendy said she was “very relieved” it had been found.

The plug door tore off the left side of the Alaska Airlines plane Friday after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, en route to Ontario, California, depressurizing the plane and forcing the pilots to turn back and land safely with all 171 passengers and six crew members on board.

Video game designer Sean Bates assumed the phone had been dropped by a jogger when he found it on the side of a road in rural Washington state because there was no scratch on it

Sean Bates, pictured here with NTSB investigators, said he was told his find was the second cell phone from the flight found by a member of the public

A photo shows the blown out window. It is offered as a door on the plane. Alaska chose not to take this option – even though the frame of the future door was completely torn out due to the hull failure

In a TikTok video, Bates said he saw a notice from the NTSB asking residents in the area to be on the lookout for anything that may have fallen from the Alaska Airlines flight.

He said he noticed the phone while walking, but at first assumed a jogger had dropped it.

“It was still fairly clean, no scratches, it was under a bush.”

Bates added that the screen was unlocked and a luggage confirmation email was visible when he picked it up, showing it was from the flight.

Homedy had previously told reporters that the plane part was a “key missing piece” in determining why the accident occurred.

“Our construction team wants to look at everything on the door – all the components on the door, to look for witness marks, to look for any paint transfer, and what shape the door was in when it was found. That can tell them a lot about what happened,” she said.

The force of the plug door loss was strong enough to blow open the cockpit door in flight, said Homendy, who said it must have been a “terrifying event” to experience.

“They heard a bang,” Homendy said of the pilots, who were interviewed by investigators.

A laminated quick reference checklist flew out the door, while the first officer lost her headset, she said. “Communication was a serious problem… It was described as chaos.”

Homendy said the cockpit voice recorder was not capturing data because it had been overwritten and again called on regulators to require existing aircraft to have recorders that capture 25 hours of data, up from the two hours currently required.

Jennifer Homendy of the National Transportation Safety Board said the impact at 16,000 feet was an “accident, not an incident.”

A passenger who filmed the tragedy said she woke up after a nap believing the plane had hit turbulence, only to discover a large hole in the fuselage

Homendy said the auto-pressurization light came on on the same Alaska Airlines plane on Dec. 7, Jan. 3 and Jan. 4, but it was unclear if there was any connection between those incidents and the accident.

After the warnings, Alaska Airlines decided to ban the plane from making long water flights to Hawaii so it could quickly return to an airport if necessary, Homendy said.

Homendy said the auto-pressurization light came on on the same Alaska Airlines plane on Dec. 7, Jan. 3 and Jan. 4, but it was unclear if there was any connection between those incidents and the accident.

The airline said: “In each case, the report was fully evaluated and resolved according to approved maintenance procedures and in full compliance with all applicable FAA regulations.”

Alaska Airlines added that it has an internal policy to limit aircraft with multiple maintenance visits on some systems to long flights over water, which was not required by the FAA.

The FAA said on Sunday that the affected fleet of Boeing MAX 9 planes, including those of other airlines such as United Airlines (UAL.O), would remain grounded until the regulator was satisfied they were safe.

The FAA initially said Saturday that the required inspections would take four to eight hours, leading many in the industry to assume the planes could return to service very soon.

But the criteria for the checks have yet to be agreed between the FAA and Boeing, meaning airlines have yet to receive detailed instructions, people familiar with the matter said.

The FAA must approve Boeing's inspection criteria before checks can be completed and planes can resume flights. Alaska Airlines said late on Sunday that it had still not received instructions from Boeing.

Alaska Airlines canceled 170 flights on Sunday and another 60 on Monday and said travel disruptions from the grounding were expected to last at least until midweek. United, which has grounded its 79 MAX 9s, canceled 230 flights on Sunday, or 8% of scheduled departures.

The accident has put Boeing under renewed scrutiny as it awaits certification of its smaller MAX 7 and larger MAX 10, which is needed to compete with a key Airbus model (AIR.PA).

In 2019, global authorities subjected all MAX planes to a wider grounding that lasted 20 months after crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia due to poorly designed cockpit software killed a total of 346 people.