Seat belts saved lives during the emergency.
A teenager’s shirt ripped off his torso when the door plug of an Alaska Airlines jet blew off mid-flight due to intense suction.
Jack, 15, was sitting in the same row where the plug flew off the plane while 16,000 feet in the air, sucking away his shirt. He scrambled to find another seat and sat next to passenger Kelly Bartlett.
“I just was trying to figure out if he was hurt because it seemed like he came from the area where the wall had blown out so I was worried that he was hurt. I was worried for his mental and emotional health,” Bartlett tells Inside Edition.
Jack and Bartlett took a selfie and wrote notes to each other on Bartlett’s phone because the wind noise made it difficult to talk.
“Arm a bit scratched. That was unbelievable. My name is Jack. Thanks for your kindness,” he wrote.
Jack told Bartlett he was sitting next to his mother and that he and his mother were okay. They were safe thanks to their safety belts.
“It was very clear that there was a problem and everyone was scared. It was a scary situation but it’s not like I felt like we were crashing down to the ground,” Bartlett says.
A physics teacher, Bob Sauer, who found the 63-pound door plug in his backyard spoke out.
“I could see that there was something gleaming white underneath the trees in the back that isn’t normally there and when I went to investigate it it was very obviously part of a plane,” Sauer said. “My heart started beating a little faster because I thought, ‘Oh my goodness people have been looking for this all weekend and it’s in my backyard.’”
The teacher's next door neighbor in Portland found a headrest on her patio.
“I picked it up and I thought, ‘Gosh this looks like an Alaska Airlines headrest that I saw the other day,’ because I was on an Alaska flight like two weeks ago going to Las Vegas to see Garth Brooks,” the neighbor says.
Investigators are still looking for four missing bolts that were supposed to hold the door plug in place. The missing bolts may help explain why the door plug blew off the airliner. Inspectors have found loose bolts on several other United and Alaska Airlines planes.
Loctite, a type of putty, may have prevented the near tragedy from happening.
Former NTSB Investigator Greg Fieth spoke with Inside Edition.
“It actually fills the threads so that the bolt, once it hardens, it can’t back out. The only way it could come out is if you use a tork wrench or some sort of wrench to actually unscrew the bolt,” Feith says.
