A woman who saved her husband from being completely sucked out of a Ryanair plane mid-flight has said she thought as he held on to his legs: “If we die, we die together.”
Ljubisa Karović was sucked out headfirst on the flight on Friday after an engine failure resulted in parts smashing the acrylic window.
“Half of his body was sticking out of the plane,” his wife, Svetlana Grković, told Serbian outlet Nova.
“I immediately reacted and grabbed his legs,” she said, adding that he was “outside up to his chest” for two minutes.
Grković said that with the help of two passengers she was able to pull her husband, who lost consciousness three times, back inside the aircraft.
She said that many people fled their seats to other parts of the plane for safety as the cabin decompressed.
The couple were on the flight, operated by the Ryanair subsidiary Malta Air, from Thessaloniki in Greece to Memmingen in Germany, for about 10 minutes when according to tracking data it suddenly dropped 9,000ft (2,700m).
Passengers have told local media that Karović had kept his seatbelt on and helped those on board keep hold of him while his upper torso was in the plane’s slipstream outside.
The 61-year-old is still in hospital in Greece and remains “seriously injured and in shock”, Grković said.
“It’s important to me that he’s alive,” she said. “His hand is particularly badly injured, and he’s got burns. He’s not able to communicate, he doesn’t remember the whole event.”
“Some people came to my aid, I remember one man and one woman,” she added. “That man helped me a lot, Ljubisa and me. I think he was Albanian, thank you very much. I didn’t remember his name, I don’t even know if he told me. I would like to meet him, to thank him personally again.”
Images and videos show that the shattered window caused oxygen masks to drop from the ceiling as the cabin became depressurised.
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One passenger told Radio Thessaloniki that those on board “thought the plane was going down”.
“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.”
Another passenger told the radio station that there were screams and “for a moment I thought someone had accidentally opened the emergency door”.
Thessaloniki airport’s operator, Fraport Greece, said the incident “is currently under investigation by the Hellenic Air and Rail Safety Investigation Authority”.
Ryanair said in a statement after the incident 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,” the airline added.
Ryanair sourced a replacement aircraft and other passengers on the flight were able to complete the trip to Memmingen the same day.