The Portland science teacher who discovered a door plug that flew off an Alaska Airlines plane spoke about his important discovery, and also explained the physics behind the object's 16,000-foot plunge.
Bob Sauer, 64, who teaches at the private Katlin Gabel School, has so far been identified only by his first name after discovering the door plug of the ill-fated Boeing 737 MAX 9 two days after Friday's explosion. Ta.
The physics teacher decided to grab a flashlight and search the yard Sunday night after receiving a phone call from his ex-wife saying authorities believed a door may have fallen into the area. The Oregonian reported.
“It still didn't seem very likely to me,” Sauer said. told NBC News on Monday evening.
As he pointed a light at some trees he and his children planted in the West Haven Sylvan neighborhood about 20 years ago, he noticed a white object and immediately realized it was “the missing piece on the plane.” I noticed that.
“It was definitely a part of an airplane. It had the same curvature as the fuselage, and there was a window in it,” Sauer told The Oregonian of the object, which weighed 65 pounds, but was on the ground. There did not appear to be a violent collision.
A former physics teacher, he wondered if the wood made the heavy door landing softer, but miraculously the door never hit anyone or caused any property damage. was.
Sauer immediately alerted the National Transportation Safety Board to his fortuitous discovery during a media briefing, and board chair Jennifer Homendy shared the good news.
“I’m so glad Bob found this,” she said, using only her first name. “We're going to pick it up and we're definitely going to start analyzing it.”
NTSB personnel who arrived to inspect the door Monday morning were overjoyed to find it completely broken and took it to Sauer's front yard, where they took photos.
The flight attendant told him that the door did not fall from directly on top of the plane.
He explained that air resistance, wind speed and the plane's speed all affect landing position.
When Sauer arrived at school late in the morning for his astronomy class, several students and teachers were already waiting anxiously to ask, “Are you Bob?”
He spent the first part of the class discussing the physics of falling, including reaching terminal velocity, the maximum speed an object can reach when falling, the paper said.
“When something falls through the air, it reaches a terminal velocity,” he told The Oregonian. “The door came down through the wood so it didn't make any dents or anything in the ground.”
Sauer, who has taught physics, astronomy, geology and chemistry at Katrin Gabel for 23 years, showed off the NTSB's “Special Operations” patch and the director's medallion he received for his efforts.
Homendy said he offered to send an employee to Sauer's class to give a presentation on how the NTSB conducts such investigations to improve safety.
“If it wasn't finals week, I would have tried to bring it up with my students,” he told NBC News after lamenting the delay in student grading.
But he told The Oregonian, referring to the accident, which left a large hole in the plane's fuselage and threatened the safety of all 177 people on board, “I'm certainly not interested in the actual events that led to this. There is,” he said.
During that time, he signs his notes and emails as “Bob, Finder of Lost Aircraft Parts.”
