Wife of Ryanair passenger partially sucked out of plane window recalls incident

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 10th.

“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.

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.

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

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.”

Things happen from time to time.

Boeing has said it ⁠was assisting the investigation led by North Macedonia, over which the incident occurred. The US 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 RTÉ.

“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.”