The missing door plug that was torn off from an Alaska Airlines flight while in the air has been found by a school teacher in his garden.

Pilots were forced to perform an emergency landing on Saturday after a hole was ripped into the side of the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says the door plug – where the hole was made – has now been recovered by a school teacher from Portland called Bob.

The incident happened after pilots reported pressurisation warning lights on three earlier flights of the same jet model – one in December and two in January.

There were also four unaccompanied minors on the flight, according to NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy, with “heroic” flight attendants ensuring they had their oxygen masks on.

“They heard a bang,” Ms Homendy said of the flight crew, adding a quick-reference laminated checklist was sucked out of the hole, while the first officer lost her headset.

“Communication was a serious issue… It was described as chaos.”

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To compound communication issues, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) had no data as it was not retrieved within two hours, when recording restarts and previous data is erased.

“It’s a very chaotic event, the circuit breaker for the CVR was not pulled, the maintenance team went out to get it, but it was right at about the two-hour mark,” Ms Homendy said.

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In response to the mid-air incident, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes to run inspections, which has caused cancellations to pile up for passengers.

Alaska Airlines said it cancelled 170 flights on Sunday and a further 60 on Monday, with more expected this week.

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