Entrepreneur Ljubisa Karović, 61, was nearly pulled out of a Ryanair plane window before passengers were able to hold onto him and plug the gap using a suitcase
A passenger who was nearly sucked out of a Ryanair plane has shared the moment “an explosion” rocked the flight.
Ljubisa Karović, 61, from Serbia, had been sleeping on board flight FR1879 from Greece to Germany when the deafening sound of the window shattering woke him. Sitting in 11F, objects flew through the air and out the window as other passengers desperately tried to hold him in place.
The passenger was left with burns and bruises on his right arm, which stretch from his his armpit to his chest. Now, with his head supported by a neck brace, Ljubisa has shared his account of what happened on the flight.
“The explosion is what I remember,” Ljubisa, an entrepreneur, told The Guardian. “Its the noise before the chaos, the noise that is always there when I close my eyes to sleep.”
He was partially sucked out of the window before being pulled back in. Ljubisa is understood to have fainted between two or three times during the ordeal, according to his lawyer.
Speaking in a villa outside the Greek coastal city of Thessaloniki, he added: “I am lucky. I don’t remember much and my head and neck still hurt but I am still alive.
“It could have been the seatbelt, the fact that I was still strapped in. But maybe it is fate. I believe in God and I thank him every day.”
Ljubisa was rushed to hospital once the plane landed, but he is living with pain. His Greek lawyer Vasilis Tsiaras said him being alive was nothing short of a miracle.
“Ljubisa dipped in and out of death,” he told the outlet. “When the cabin lost pressure he was hurled out of the window from his chest up and immediately lost consciousness. He was on that plane heading to Germany to celebrate his brother’s birthday. Instead, at 15,000ft he ended up with his head and right arm outside the aircraft as it moved at a speed of more than 600km/h. Imagine that. He looked at death, that other world, and came back.”
Ljubisa’s wife Svetlana Grković, who was seated three rows behind, recalled the moment oxygen masks came down and how passengers held her husband in place. Svetlana said a passenger, possibly an Albanian, used a bag, then a suitcase to plug the hole.
Ryanair said its cabin crew did a “phenomenal job” during the incident.
Michael O’Leary, boss of the firm, said an initial investigation into the incident on 10 July between Greece and Germany suggests “it looks like a foreign object damage to the engine on takeoff at Thessaloniki but … we can’t say that definitively”.
He insisted that the engine on the 18-year-old Boeing 737 plane had been fully serviced and overhauled in the past two years. The aircraft was operated by Ryanair’s subsidiary Malta Air.
