On the patio of a house they find the door of the Alaska Airlines Boeing that took off in flight

A school teacher in Oregon found part of it the door of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplane which broke down mid-flight on Friday.

“I’m happy to announce it “We found the doorstop.”National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said at a news conference.

The piece is a cover panel used to cover an emergency exit useless depending on the number of places available.

“In the photos I only see the outside of the doorstop, the white parts. We can’t see anything else, but we will go and get it and make sure we start analyzing it,” Homendy said, according to the AFP news agency.

The organization reported it a school teacher found the door panel in the backyard of his home in Portland, Oregon, in the western part of the United States.

The discovery could help clarify what happened, which caused no serious injuries but forced airlines and aviation safety organizations around the world to ground some versions of those planes pending inspections.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it on the social network.

The administration added that 171 planes of this model will have to be inspected and that each inspection will last four to eight hours.

Boeing has delivered about 218 737 MAX planes so far, the company informed AFP.

On Friday, Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 took off from Portland Airport and shortly thereafter the crew reported a “pressurization issue,” according to the FAA.

The plane quickly returned to Portland, and images posted on social media showed a hole where the side panel had blown out, with emergency oxygen masks hanging from the ceiling.

Vi Nguyen, a passenger, told the New York Times that she woke up with a start.

“I opened my eyes and… The first thing I saw was the oxygen mask right in front of me. “I looked to the left and the side panel of the plane was gone,” Nguyen said.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun scheduled a safety meeting with all employees at the company’s Washington state plant for Tuesday.

For its part, Alaska Airlines, which has grounded all of its planes of that model, reported Saturday that more than a quarter of its Max 9 fleet has already been inspected, with no irregularities reported.

United Airlines, which has the world’s largest fleet of 737 MAX 9s, said it had grounded 46 planes and 33 had already been checked.

Aeroméxico will keep its 19 B737 MAX-9 planes grounded for checks, the airline said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Panamanian Copa Airlines announced it had grounded 21 planes and Turkish Airlines said Sunday it had grounded five planes in its fleet.

Islandair noted that none of its 737 MAX 9s have the aircraft configuration specified in the FAA grounding order.

Boeing’s 737 MAX planes have been grounded worldwide for 20 months following a ban following two MAX 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019 that resulted in 346 deaths.