The flight was supposed to be a simple July trip across Europe. A routine journey from Greece to Germany. But one ordinary Friday morning turned into a terrifying nightmare.
Ljubisa Karovic and his wife Svetlana boarded their Ryanair plane in Thessaloniki. They were heading to Memmingen. And the engines roared to life as the aircraft climbed.
The roar of the violent wind swallowed the terrified screams.
Then the unimaginable happened. A loud noise echoed through the cabin. Ljubisa recalled waking up to a sound like a bomb going off. The window right next to him suddenly shattered.
But the violent change in cabin pressure was instant. The heavy suction grabbed him immediately. He was suddenly being pulled out of the tiny opening. His head and shoulders went completely outside.
The freezing altitude winds ripped into his brutally exposed face.
So he was stuck halfway out of a commercial airplane. The force of the sky pulling him further out. Svetlana was sitting three rows behind him in seat 14C on the flight.
She saw the chaos. She realized what was happening to her husband. And she rushed forward through the screaming passengers. She threw herself onto the floor and grabbed his legs.
Her desperate grip on his ankles kept him from vanishing into the sky.
She told reporters she reacted immediately and grabbed his legs. “I thought, ‘If we die, we die together,’ it was horrible,” she said. She held on with everything she had in pure desperation.
The entire cabin was frozen in absolute terror for a moment. But then others snapped out of their shock. Passengers quickly ran down the narrow aisle to pull him back inside.
A brave Albanian stranger stepped into the violent windstorm to help.
Svetlana remembered one Albanian man who was incredible. She said he did all he could to bring him in. Then he tried to block the broken glass window to stop the aggressive suction.
The man tried to plug the hole with a bag. But the suction immediately ripped the bag out into the empty sky. Then he shoved a heavy suitcase into the frame and it finally held steady.
The thick blood poured down his completely crushed and deformed face.
Svetlana said they pulled him back together. “His entire face was deformed and blood was pouring from his nose and mouth,” she said. Ljubisa was barely conscious during the wild rescue.
“For a moment I was conscious, but then I don’t remember anything until they woke me, I was covered in blood,” he recalled. So the plane made a rapid emergency return.
A rogue metal fan blade had sliced straight through the thick glass.
Ryanair stated that a foreign object hit the engine. A fan blade broke off and slammed into the window next to Ljubisa. And the aircraft landed safely back in the Thessaloniki terminal.
He received medical assistance on the ground. The physical toll was devastating. He suffered severe friction burns along with serious spine and shoulder injuries that require multiple surgeries.
“I am lucky, I don’t remember much and my head and neck still hurt, but I am still alive,” he said. But doctors warned him the grueling physical recovery will take many long months.
“I can’t go out, everything bothers me, mentally I am destroyed, this has had a huge impact on my life,” he confessed. He told a German newspaper that he is psychologically shattered.
“Whenever I hear the sound of a plane, I become stressed,” he added. “As soon as I close my eyes, I see pictures of what I experienced, those few minutes, it’s a nightmare,” he said.
