Working iPhone found on side of road ‘likely’ fell from Alaska Airlines flight

The US’s National Transportation Safety Board says it has recovered a working iPhone that “likely” fell from the Alaska Airlines flight that required an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon, over the weekend after a passenger plane’s door panel blew out while midair.

An NTSB spokesperson issued a statement about the phone to the Guardian after the newspaper asked about a social media user’s viral post which described finding the device on the side of the road.

“That was one of the phones collected that is likely from the flight,” the NTSB spokesperson said in response to the post from X user Seanathan Bates. “It has since been turned over to Alaska Airlines.”

Bates posted on Sunday that he had found a functioning iPhone on the side of the road “in airplane mode with half a battery and open to a baggage claim” for the Alaska Airlines flight which had been diverted to Portland two days earlier.

“[It] survived a 16,000 foot drop perfectly in tact!” said Bates’s post, which had been viewed nearly 12m times and reposted by more than 10,000 other accounts as of Monday morning.

Bates’s post said he called in his discovery and was told by an NTSB official that “it was the second phone to be found”. The post joked that there had been “no door [found] yet”. But a Portland school teacher indeed found the missing plug door in his backyard at some point on Sunday, according to investigators.

There were 171 passengers and six crew members on Alaska Airlines flight number 1282 when it took off from Portland, Oregon, en route to Ontario, California. A covered exit door on the left side of the jet tore off at 16,000 feet (4,877 meters) shortly after takeoff, depressurizing the plane while forcing the pilots to turn back and land safely.

No one was sitting directly in the window seat next to the torn-off door. However, a teenage boy and his mother were in the middle and aisle seats, and a passenger who spoke with NBC described how the son’s shirt was completely blown off his body.

Regulators have temporarily grounded the type of plane at the center of Friday’s harrowing episode: the Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft. Investigators have said that initial findings do not suggest a widespread flaw with the Boeing Max 9, but those aircraft had not been cleared to return to the skies as of Monday morning.

Alaska Airlines canceled 170 flights on Sunday and additional 60 on Monday. The company warned travel disruptions were expected to continue at least until the middle of the week. United, which has grounded its 79 Max 9s, canceled 230 flights on Sunday, 8% of scheduled departures.