Wife of Ryanair passenger partially sucked out of plane window recalls incident
Details Emerge from Ryanair Flight Incident Over Greece
By Ivana Sekularac and Alexandros Avramidis
The Incident: Sudden Cabin Decompression
THESSALONIKI, Greece, July 15 (Reuters) - Svetlana Maksimovic and her husband Ljubisa Karovic had just settled into a Ryanair flight last week when a loud bang pierced the hum of engines. Within seconds, she saw her 61-year-old husband being sucked through a dislodged cabin window.
In what Greek officials have described as a rare incident, Karovic, sitting in a window seat, was pulled partway out of the plane as his wife and others held on to him on the flight between the Greek city of Thessaloniki and Germany on July 10.
"I've never heard anything louder in my life before. I just (then) turned around and saw that part of his body had already gone out the window," Maksimovic told Reuters. His head and right arm were hanging out, she said.
Possible Cause and Airline Response
Greek media and airport sources said that most likely a piece of engine broke off and smashed a window early in the flight, causing the cabin to decompress.
Ryanair has confirmed that a window dislodged during the flight, and senior executive Eddie Wilson said on Wednesday that photographs clearly showed damage to the engine and that the flight had returned to the airport using a single engine.
He declined to speculate on the cause, or whether engine debris had struck the window, pending the results of ongoing investigations.
Aftermath: Medical and Legal Actions
Karovic is now being treated in hospital in Thessaloniki with severe neck and arm injuries, Maksimovic said.
The couple have hired a lawyer. "What happened was extremely serious," said the couple's legal adviser, Vassilis Tsiaras, adding that the pending results of the probe were pivotal.
PULLING HIM BACK INSIDE
Passenger Reactions and Emergency Response
After takeoff, Karovic was relaxed, Maksimovic said, and had probably fallen asleep.
She said that after the loud bang occurred, a woman sitting next to her husband kept pulling on his left arm, but it was only after another passenger came to help that they succeeded in getting him back inside the plane. It had by then started to descend.
Maksimovic, who had left her seat to help her husband, put an oxygen mask on him while another passenger gave her one for her own use.
"His face was completely disfigured, there was blood everywhere and his ears, eyes, nose were completely deformed," she said, adding that her husband was still struggling to recover.
"The consequences remain for him and for me," Maksimovic said. "How we're going to heal and how long that treatment will last and in what way, we'll see."
Investigations and Industry Response
'THINGS HAPPEN FROM TIME TO TIME'
Ongoing Probes and Official Statements
Boeing has said it was assisting the investigation led by North Macedonia, over which the incident occurred. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency are involved in the probe.
A Greek prosecutor has launched a probe into the case, while Greek air accident investigators are also looking into it. The aircraft is still in Greece.
"It is a serious incident. It'll be investigated, and we will take whatever recommendations come out of that," Ryanair's Wilson told Irish state broadcaster RTE.
"When you're doing 1.2 million flights per year, things happen from time to time, but people can be assured that we've got the best-trained crews, and that was demonstrated last week."
(Reporting by Alexandros Avramidis in Thessaloniki and Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade; Additional reporting by Renee Maltezou in Athens and Padraic Halpin in Dublin; Editing by Michele Kambas, Matthew Lewis and Jan Harvey)
