Sean Bates was early to meet a friend for lunch in Portland on Sunday, so he decided to take a little detour.
Bates, a software engineer from Vancouver, had been following the story of the door plug that ripped off Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Friday night, depressurizing the plane and sucking things into the night sky.
Fortunately, no people were seriously injured.
He heard National Transportation Safety Board officials asking people to keep an eye out for debris, he said Tuesday.
And so, Bates said, he parked at the Sunset Transit Center. The Sunset Transit Center is located on Southwest Barnes Road in Beaverton and “took a walk around there.”
He walked along the side of the road, he said, looking for anything that might come from an airplane.
“I look and see a phone sitting under a bush,” he said.
At first, Bates thought maybe a jogger had lost the iPhone. But then he said: “I picked it up and there was a broken charging cable. When I looked at the screen it was in airplane mode.”
That's when he knew he might actually have found something from the plane.
“I thought, 'There's no way that fell out of the sky,'” he said.
But it turned out that it was.
Bates said the phone wasn't cracked and when he swiped up, it opened without the screen locked. Sure enough, an email screen opened. The owner of the phone was apparently looking at the information about his checked baggage.
After making his discovery, Bates immediately called Beaverton's emergency number, where he was transferred to NTSB investigators who were a short distance from his location. He met with someone who, he said, had just found another phone from the flight.
He turned the phone over to investigators, who told him they would log the phone and return it to Alaska Airlines, which would return it to the passenger who lost it.
Since reporting his discovery, Bates said most people have been shocked at how well the phone survived a 16,000-foot drop.
And he got a lot of questions about the case.
“So many phone case companies call me and try to figure out what case the phone is,” he said. “Next time I find a phone falling from the sky, I will definitely take a photo of the back.”
– Lizzy Acker
503-221-8052; [email protected]; @lizzzyacker
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