The wife of a man who was partially sucked out of a Ryanair flight window at 20,000ft has described the horrifying ordeal, revealing she desperately tried to pull him back in as he repeatedly lost consciousness. Svetlana Grković was travelling with her husband, Ljubisa Karović, 61, from Greece to Germany when they heard a loud bang around half an hour after take-off, causing sudden decompression.
The passenger window was shattered by what appeared to be a part of the engine breaking off. ‘The pressure pulled Ljubisa. Luckily he was strapped in, but half of his body was sticking out of the plane. I immediately reacted and grabbed his legs,’ she told Serbian outlet Nova. ’I thought: ‘If we die, we die together’. It was horrible.’
Grković lost consciousness several times while hanging outside of the plane as other passengers rushed in to help hold him down. ‘Three of us were pulling him back inside. The oxygen masks dropped and chaos broke out,’ she told Greek outlet ERT. ‘They put a suitcase against the window but it was sucked out.’
When they landed, Karović was immediately taken to the hospital in Thessaloniki, where he remains, apparently still unable to speak due to his injuries. ‘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,’ said Mrs Grković.
Flight tracking data shows the flight was in the air for around 10 minutes before quickly dropping around 2,700m. A fellow traveller, Christina, described the moment of decompression, saying there was a loud bang ‘like a tyre bursting’ before the window ruptured. ‘We immediately understood that there had been decompression because we had lost ground,’ she said.
Ryanair confirmed that a passenger window dislodged in-flight, and the aircraft landed normally in Thessaloniki. One passenger requested and received medical assistance on the ground. A replacement aircraft was arranged to bring passengers to Memmingen, which departed Thessaloniki later that morning.
