Before Sean Bates drove into Portland on Sunday to meet a friend for lunch, he caught an advisory from the National Transportation Safety Board asking for help locating loose debris from the Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane that blew a hole in its fuselage midflight over the weekend.
Bates, an app developer in Vancouver, saw the search area, near where Portland meets Beaverton, was right where he was heading.
An aviation enthusiast, Bates has long followed post-crash investigations, watching videos about their progress and reading blogs of experts and other hobbyists. Now, an investigation was unfolding in his backyard.
He gave himself an extra hour before lunch to stroll the area near the Sunset Transit Center in Portland.
He wasn’t alone. A few walkers and joggers had their eyes up, he noticed. One man was flying a drone.
As Bates walked along Barnes Road, something caught his eye: an iPhone, face up, under a bush. It was hidden slightly beneath a thicket of thorns and grass. Save for a few scratches, it looked in decent shape, and Bates figured it must have fallen from someone’s pocket or off the roof of a passing car.
He picked it up and saw a piece of a cord still in the phone’s port, apparently ripped away from a charger. He tried to flip it on. To his surprise, the screen lit up, and the phone wasn’t locked. It was clear the last person using it had been checking their email.
The message? A baggage claim receipt for Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, the same flight that was forced to make an emergency landing after the hole opened up at 16,000 feet.
Bates couldn’t believe that not only had he found a passenger’s phone but it still worked.
“The No. 1 comment I’ve been getting every place I’ve posted the picture was that, ‘My iPhone drops 5 feet, and it shatters and this phone lands after 16,000 feet and is just fine,’ ” he said in an interview Monday.
Bates called the local nonemergency police line, which patched him through to the NTSB. He was connected with a local investigator and gave her the cellphone. This was the second phone turned into the agency, the investigator told him.
For as much as he reads about aviation, Bates had never heard of a door plug — the piece the flew off the Alaska Airlines flight.
“I think the fact that none of us ever heard of a door plug before tells us a lot about how rarely we’ve even considered this as even a possible thing to go wrong,” he said. Still, it doesn’t give him any hesitation about flying. “I’m still going to fly a 737.”
This is probably the end of the line for Bates’ involvement. A spokesperson for the NTSB said in an email the phone had been returned to Alaska to pass along to the owner.
“It’s just kind of a fun little thing,” he said. “What are the odds of finding the phone?”
