What should have been a routine flight to Germany turned into a full-fledged nightmare for a 61-year-old man from Serbia, who was almost sucked out of his flight after his cabin window broke.
The man, whose name has not yet been revealed, had been sitting in the window seat of a Ryanair flight from Greece's Thessaloniki to Memmingen in Germany.
Initial reports say that at around six in the morning, a loud bang was heard when the plane had been flying over Macedonia, which shocked him and most other passengers.
Before he could realise what was happening, a piece of the Boeing 737-800 flight's engine broke off and hit the man's window, causing it to break, which rapidly depressurised the cabin.
Panic spread through the cabin as eyewitnesses described the man's whole head being sucked out the window—up to his shoulders—as the people near him quickly moved to pull him back in.
Oxygen masks also dropped as the cabin pressure dropped rapidly.
“Most of us had fallen asleep, we had closed our eyes. There was a noise, like a tyre bursting,” a passenger told Radio Thessaloniki.
“We immediately realised 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," the passenger added.
Though he had been wearing a seatbelt, witnesses claimed that he might have been sucked out of the flight, had it not been for his wife who reportedly held down his legs.
Others were then able to help drag him back inside.
In a Friday statement, Ryanair said the aircraft “returned to Thessaloniki shortly after takeoff when a passenger window detached during the flight".
“The aircraft landed normally and the passengers returned to the terminal," it added. After the landing, the Serbian man was hospitalised with friction burns.
