Cause of Ryanair window break that sucked man out of plane found by investigators
On 10 July, a Ryanair flight set off from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki and quickly turned into a bit of a nightmare for one passenger in particular.
Serbian national Ljubisa Karović ended up becoming known as the man who got ‘sucked out’ of a broken window on the plane.
And US investigators have now found what caused this to happen in a preliminary report.
The 61-year-old suffered injuries after his head and right shoulder were sucked into the hole not long after setting off for Germany.
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Thankfully, his wife Svetlana was able to grab his legs with two other passengers helping to hold onto them for several minutes.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says this incident happened after an engine fan blade broke shortly after take-off on the flight operated by Ryanair subsidiary Malta Air.
This sent parts flying, causing the plane window to shatter.
The NTSB explained that the Boeing 737-8AS ‘experienced a No. 2 (right) engine fan-blade-out (FBO) failure during climb out from the Thessaloniki International Airport (SKG)’.
“Engine fragments breached the fuselage and the cabin depressurized,” investigators wrote in the report.
“The crew elected to return to SKG where they made an uneventful landing.”
Greek authorities ‘delegated the investigation in full to the NTSB’.
After the window broke, oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling after the window broke and the cabin lost pressure.
Passengers told Greek media how panic spread through the aircraft with screams following Karović being partially sucked out of the missing window.
One told Radio Thessaloniki: “Most people had fallen asleep, we had closed our eyes. We heard a sound, I’d describe it like a tyre bursting … but very loud.
“We knew straight away we lost pressure because we lost altitude.”
Karović suffered neck and shoulder injuries and friction burns as a result of being nearly sucked out of the plane.
Svetlana told Serbian-language outlet Nova that when half her husband's body was 'sticking out of the plane' she grabbed onto him with one thought.
“I immediately reacted and grabbed his legs. I thought: 'If we die, we die together'. It was horrible," she recounted.
And he said: “Only for one moment was I conscious and I cannot remember the rest.
“I had blood all over me, blood was dripping from my face and my hands.
“As soon as I close my eyes, images appear of the nightmare I experienced.
“I am not even contemplating getting another flight. Every time I hear an aeroplane, I get stress and a fever.
“Mentally I have hit rock bottom. It has an effect on both my work and family. It is a complete upheaval in my life.”
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary previously suggested that ‘foreign object damage’ to an engine may have caused the scary incident.
He said that the aircraft had been fully serviced and overhauled within the past couple of years.
O’Leary was reprimanded at the time by the NTSB as it said investigators hadn’t ruled anything out and the Ryanair chief executive was not authorised to discuss it.
Flight records show that the aircraft climbed past 15,000 feet (4,570 meters) about six minutes after departure and then immediately descended to about 6,000 feet (1,830 meters) ‘to burn fuel for 30 minutes’ before returning to Thessaloniki about an hour after taking off, Flightradar24 said.
Jess Battison