than 150 boeing jets. president biden warming against extremism as he visits the site of the 2015 charleston church shooting. another step in his re-election campaign where he says democracy is at stake. a growing mystery surrounding the hospitalization of the secretary of defense. how could so many people including president biden not know that lloyd austin was rushed to the icu? following these developing stories and many more right here at cnn news central. it is the top of the hour. i am brianna keilar. investigators have never covered a critical piece of evidence as they are trying to figure out why a chunk, a key chunk of an alaska airlines plane tore off midflight. the ntsb says the missing door plug that fell from the plane shortly after taking off from portland was found in someone s yard. federal officials say two cell
the ntsb had asked people to go and report anything that looked like it had fallen out of the recent alaska airlines accident. thankfully, no one was injured or got sucked out but they did lose some belongings. they are still looking for the door. i found a phone sitting on the side of the road that had apparently fallen 16,000 feet. i was of course a little skeptical. this could be thrown out of a car, someone dropped it while they were driving. i found it. it was still pretty clean, no scratches on it. sitting under a bush. it did not have a screen lock on it. i opened it up and it wasn t airplane mode with the travel confirmation and baggage claim for alaska 1282. lo and behold, an amazing discovery. as we talk about the latest with what the ntsb is thinking
something else. they will gradually put together. it will take time. then we will have a clear indication of why this went wrong. all of us who have to fight have faith in what s going to happen moving forward. appreciate the expertise, thanks so much. joining us to understand or try to understand all of this, we have cnn transportation analyst mary scioto. she is the former inspector general for the apartment of transportation. mary, currently has ongoing litigation for a crash in 2019, we should mention. federal investigators now have this missing door plug that fell from the plane. what kind of information are they going to be able to determine with this missing piece? with the missing piece, it s going to be very vertical pieces of information as to what is the shape of the fasteners? when you look at the pictures, the circles were the fasteners would have gone or the letters still look pretty intact.
to it. that is why finding the door so important. ntsb brings all these together and re-creates everything. how did it come together. was it pressure. to the dining room and you sealed it all up, that is what this is. it is not a door, it is a place that is meant to be permanent, not to be removed unless you want to. unfortunately, not the first boeing incident involving the 737 and the max eight as well. absently. if you look at some of the recent incidents in the past few years, very troubling for boeing. we had these fatal accidents in indonesia and ethiopia. we have had other incidents involving the max nine. all of which have raised alarm bells. these are all different. every aircraft is different from the other one. all these cancellations as to
they were completely round, they look in great shape. they do not look to be defective. by getting the door and other pieces, they will hopefully be able to pinpoint exactly what the failure point was. remains to be seen if the fasteners both in laches are still in a piece but from what was on the plane, those attach points look to be pretty pristine, pretty intact. another professor got to cut apart a 727 and round holes were not still around after a lot of pressures or incidents and years of service. that is going to be important to look at those two pieces very carefully. as tom pointed out, this is relatively new plane. three separate occasions before friday s incident. what you think of that? could there be a correlation? i do.