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London: A woman who saved her husband from being sucked out of an aircraft window has revealed she thought they would die together as she held on to his legs.
Svetlana Grković and her husband Ljubiša Karović were on a Ryanair flight from Thessaloniki in Greece to Memmingen in Germany on Friday when the window next to them shattered while they were dozing in their seats.
In her first public account of the emergency, Grković said her husband was sucked so far out of the window that his head and shoulders were outside the aircraft, as she and other passengers tried to drag him back in. The flight made an emergency landing at Thessaloniki, where it first departed.
“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,” she told Serbian news outlet Nova.
“As the window broke, decompression occurred in the cabin. The pressure pulled Ljubiša, luckily he was strapped in, but half of his body was sticking out of the plane. I immediately reacted and grabbed his legs.
“I thought: ‘If we die, we die together’. It was horrible.”
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency is investigating the incident.
Ryanair has confirmed the incident unfolded on a Boeing 737 NG operated by its Malta Air subsidiary. The airline said in a statement that a “passenger window dislodged in flight” but has not named a reason for the potential disaster. “The aircraft landed normally, and the passengers returned to the terminal,” it said.
Grković said some passengers panicked when the air decompressed and oxygen masks were released.
“Some people came to my aid, I remembered one man and one woman. That man helped me a lot, me and Ljubiša,” she told Nova.
“We held Ljubiša’s legs together, while the plane was returning to the airport in Thessaloniki. 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.”
Her husband was taken to hospital by ambulance when the aircraft landed.
“I know that Ljubiša lost consciousness several times,” she said.
“It’s important to me that he’s alive. He’s seriously injured and in shock. His hand is particularly badly injured, and he’s got burns. He’s not able to communicate; he doesn’t remember the whole event.”
Local media in Greece reported that a piece of engine broke off and smashed a window early in the flight, causing the cabin to decompress. The two airport sources with knowledge of the incident relayed the same details to Reuters.
A video posted on social media appeared to show an uncontained engine failure on the damaged Boeing 737, with fan blades missing. Such a failure occurs when internal components like fan blades shatter and breach the casing, sending debris flying.
Reuters reported a similar incident in 2018 on another Boeing 737 NG when a fan blade in the engine of a Southwest Airlines aircraft in the US caused a broken window that partially sucked out a passenger, who died from the injuries.
The US National Transportation Safety Board responded to the accident by telling Boeing to redesign the fan cowl structure on the 737 NG aircraft, the model before the 737-MAX.
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