Missing door plug that detached from Alaska Airlines plane found in Oregon backyard

A missing door plug that could be key to the investigation into what caused it to detach from a plane midflight Friday has been found in the backyard of a Portland, Oregon-area resident, officials said Sunday.

After the end of a news conference in which National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy laid out the probe’s status, she returned to give a piece of positive news: “I’m excited to announce that we found the door plug,” she said.

Identifying the resident who sent two photos of the item to the NTSB only as Bob, a schoolteacher, she said, “Thank you, Bob.”

“We’re going to go pick that up and make sure that we begin analyzing it,” Homendy said.

At the end of the first full day of the NTSB investigation into the accident on board Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, the agency’s chair indicated that some factors were complicating the probe: The plane’s cockpit voice recorder’s record of the event was inadvertently taped over, and, at the time, the door plug had not been found.

“That is unfortunately a loss for us,” Homendy said, lamenting the loss of voice data and sounding frustrated during a news conference Sunday night. “That is a loss for safety.”

Homendy supports expanding the minimum time recorded on the devices from two hours to 25 hours. Such a time span would have saved the cockpit voice data from Friday’s accident.

She said the device from Friday’s flight automatically recorded over the pertinent voice data because someone failed to power it down. It starts a fresh recording, wiping out the last one, every two hours.

“The circuit breaker was not pulled,” Homendy said.

She described chaos and communication issues on board…