‘Are you the Bob?’ Oregon teacher finds missing piece of Boeing jet in backyard

PORTLAND, Ore. — An Oregon physics teacher now signs his notes and emails as “The Bob, finder of missing aircraft parts.”

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And, why not? Bob Sauer is the man who found a missing mid-cabin door plug that was torn from an Alaska Airlines airplane during a flight on Friday, The Oregonian reported. Sauer found the piece of aircraft in his backyard.

The National Transportation Safety Board announced during a news conference late Sunday that the missing door plug from the 737 Max 9 had been found behind the home of a schoolteacher known only as Bob.

Sauer, 64, who lives in the Portland, Oregon, suburb of Cedar Hills, teaches at the Catlin Gabel School in Portland. He told the newspaper that he received a telephone call from his ex-wife on Sunday, who told him that authorities believed the part might have landed in his neighborhood.

Sauer grabbed a flashlight and looked around his house. He discovered a white metal object leaning against a cedar tree, The New York Times reported.

“My heart started beating a little faster,” Sauer told the newspaper on Monday. “And I thought, ‘There’s no way.’”

Sauer called the National Transportation Safety Board, which arrived at his house on Monday at about 7 a.m. PST, the Times reported. They spoke with him for 30 minutes and hauled the door plug from his yard. He added that the agency gave him a medallion emblazoned with an eagle to thank him for contacting officials.

He said the approximately 65-pound, 4-feet-by-2-feet part “had come down through those (cedar) trees” and there was no indication that it hit the ground hard, the Oregonian reported.

When he showed up at Catlin Gabel later Monday morning for his first class, about a dozen students and other teachers were waiting outside his door, according to the newspaper.

They all asked the same question.

“Are you the Bob?”

Sauer spent the first 15 minutes of his astronomy class sharing his story, the Oregonian reported.

The physics principle of terminal velocity was at play with this object falling from 16,000 feet up, Sauer told them.

“When something is falling through air, it will reach a final velocity,” he said. Terminal velocity is the maximum velocity attainable by an object as it falls through a fluid, which in this case is air.

Sauer said the more relevant lesson was that amazing things could happen, the Times reported.

“Mostly they couldn’t believe it happened in my backyard -- to someone they knew,” Sauer told the newspaper about his students’ reactions.

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