The incident happened on a Ryanair flight from Greece to Germany on July 10
Credit: Despoina Papapavlou via REUTERS
NEED TO KNOW
- A passenger on a Ryanair flight was nearly sucked out of a plane due to a “dislodged” window mid-flight on Friday, July 10
- Svetlana Grković said her husband, Ljubiša Karović, was “sticking out of the plane,” and had to grab his legs to keep him secure
- Grković described her husband as being “seriously injured and in shock,” adding that he has burns and does not remember the entire incident
The wife of a passenger who was nearly sucked out of a plane window mid-flight has spoken out about the “horrible” ordeal.
Svetlana Grković and her 61-year-old husband, Ljubiša Karović, were flying from Thessaloniki, Greece to Memmingen, Germany on the Irish airline Ryanair on the morning of Friday, July 10, when a window on the plane “dislodged inflight.”
In a statement to PEOPLE, Ryanair said the flight returned to the airport “shortly after take-off.” According to Serbian outlet Nova, the plane had been flying for around 30 minutes when the incident happened.
“It was as if a part of the engine broke off and hit the window where my husband, Ljubiša, was sitting. Luckily, he was strapped in,” Grković told Nova in the translated article in an interview published on July 11.
She explained that half of her husband’s body was “sticking out of the plane.” She added, “I immediately reacted and grabbed his legs. I thought: ‘If we die, we die together.’ It was horrible.”
Credit: Despoina Papapavlou via REUTERS
Grković also said that a mother reacted by squeezing her child so tightly that she “almost suffocated him.”
She added there were two passengers, a man and a woman, who helped her hold Karović’s legs together as they returned to Thessaloniki.
Upon landing, Grković said an ambulance was waiting to take Karović to the Thessaloniki hospital. “It’s important to me that he’s alive,” she said. Grković described her husband as being “seriously injured and in shock” to the outlet, adding that he has burns and does not remember the entire incident.
According to Ryanair, a “flight from Thessaloniki to Memmingen on Friday morning (10 July) returned to Thessaloniki shortly after take-off when a passenger window dislodged inflight.” The airline said the flight returned to the airport and that 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.
A female passenger, who was not identified, recalled the harrowing experience on Radio Thessaloniki, according to the Agence France-Presse (AFP). She said that “most” of the passengers had fallen asleep before they heard a sound of a tire “bursting.”
Credit: Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
“We immediately realized there had been a decompression,” she recalled, per AFP. “There were screams … for a moment I thought someone had accidentally opened the emergency door.”
“The masks dropped and there was a strong smell,” she continued. “The head and shoulders of one passenger were outside the window. Fortunately, he hadn’t taken off his seat belt.”
A video circulating on social media and obtained by the BBC showed the aftermath of the flight, including the cabin covered in oxygen masks, which had been dropped on seats.
Credit: Getty
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The video then panned over to show the alleged window that had broken in the incident. It appeared to be entirely blown out with jagged pieces of glass surrounding the edges of it. The window shade also appeared to have been almost entirely broken off .
Ryanair said in its statement that a replacement aircraft was arranged to take passengers to Memmingen. It departed Thessaloniki at 9:53 a.m. local time on July 10.
The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) told PEOPLE on July 10 that it was “aware of an incident involving a Ryanair Group aircraft, registered and operated by Malta Air.”
“The independent investigation of this incident is a matter for the relevant aviation safety investigation authorities. The IAA will provide any assistance requested by the Aviation Safety Investigation Authority in Greece and the Civil Aviation Directorate within Transport Malta, in accordance with established international aviation safety procedures,” it added.
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