A woman has described the terrifying moment her husband was nearly sucked out of a plane after a cabin window dislodged minutes into their flight.
Svetlana Grković Maksimović said the couple were heading from the Greek city of Thessaloniki to Memmingen, Germany, on Friday when, minutes after takeoff, she saw her 61-year-old husband, Ljubisa Karović, “sticking out of the plane” after the cabin window shattered.
“I’ve never heard anything louder in my life before. I just (then) turned around and saw that part of his body had already gone out the window,” Maksimović told Reuters. “His head and right arm were hanging out.”
‘We couldn’t pull him away’
Maksimović recalled how she unbuckled her seatbelt and grabbed him with another female passenger.
Maksimović reportedly told local media: “I thought: ‘If we die, we die together.’ It was horrible.”
“We just didn’t have the strength. We couldn’t pull him away from the window. Then a man from across the aisle got up, came over, and helped us. Together, we managed to pull him back inside,” she added.
They managed to pull Karović back inside the plane after a nearly two-minute struggle, during which he lost consciousness three times, before the aircraft returned to Thessaloniki.
When the plane landed, an ambulance was waiting to take the 61-year-old to a hospital in Thessaloniki, where Karović was “seriously injured and in shock.”
A broken window of the Ryanair aircraft, following a reported emergency landing.
(Reuters / Reuters)
“It’s important to me that he’s alive… his hand is particularly badly injured, and he’s got burns. He’s not able to communicate, he doesn’t remember the whole event,” she told BBC Serbia.
Maksimović also said she hadn’t stopped thinking about the nightmare and wondered “whether we will ever get on a plane again.”
“I am constantly doing something to take my mind off what happened, but those images just won’t leave. Yesterday I got into an elevator, and I suddenly felt a terrible sense of suffocation,” she told BBC Serbia.
Passengers thought plane was going down
Flight tracking data showed the flight, operated by Ryanair subsidiary Malta Air, was in the air for about 10 minutes when it suddenly dropped 9,000 feet.
One passenger told AFP that several passengers had fallen asleep when they heard what sounded like a tire “bursting.”
The BBC reported another passenger telling Radio Thessaloniki that those on board “thought the plane was going down.”
The interior of the Ryanair aircraft, following the reported emergency landing.
(Despoina Papapavlou via REUTERS / REUTERS)
“The decompression was extreme,” she said. “It felt like we couldn’t breathe. The man who was injured was bleeding and then lost consciousness several times, most likely because of the lack of oxygen and the shock.”
Ryanair said in a statement that the flight “returned to Thessaloniki shortly after takeoff when a passenger window dislodged in flight.”
“The aircraft landed normally and passengers returned to the terminal… One passenger requested and received medical assistance on the ground in Thessaloniki,” the airline added.
The incident is under investigation by the Hellenic Air and Rail Safety Investigation Authority, Greece’s independent air and rail accident investigation agency.
Yahoo has approached Ryanair and Boeing for comment.
