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It pays to buckle up.
A passenger on Ryanair — because of course — had his insistence on keeping his seat belt fastened abruptly validated when the window next to him suddenly “detached” and sucked the bulk of his body out of the plane.
Witnesses told Agence France-Presse that the man, a tourist from Serbia en route from Thessaloniki in Greece to Memmingen in Germany, had to be pulled in by the other passengers. Yes, several of them.
“Most of us had fallen asleep, we had closed our eyes. There was a noise, like a tyre bursting,” one of them told Radio Thessaloniki, per AFP. “We immediately realized there had been a decompression. 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 added. “The head and shoulders of one passenger were outside the window. Fortunately, he hadn’t taken off his seat belt.”
Per AFP, Greek media reported that the window was broken by a piece of debris that came off one of the plane’s engines, causing the cabin to decompress.
Ryanair in a statement described the incident anticlimactically. The plane “returned to Thessaloniki shortly after take-off when a passenger window detached during the flight. The aircraft landed normally and the passengers returned to the terminal.” An apology would’ve been nice, maybe.
Nearly getting airplane-keelhauled by the wind gods could take quite the toll physically and mentally. The man was hospitalized with friction burns, but thankfully authorities said he was in good condition otherwise.
You may remember a similar incident occurred over two years ago, when the door panel on an Alaska Airlines flight suddenly blew out midair, causing a massive scandal for the plane’s manufacturer Boeing. That plane was a Boeing 737 MAX 9; the Ryanair one was a 737 NG.
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