A passenger who was partially sucked out of a window during a Ryanair flight said “the noise before the chaos” is his main memory of the ordeal.<\/p>\n
Ljubisa Karovic, 61, suffered neck and shoulder injuries after the window broke during the flight from the Greek city of Thessaloniki to Memmingen near Munich, Germany, on 10 July.<\/p>\n
The Serbian businessman told The Guardian: “The explosion is what I remember. It’s the noise before the chaos, the noise that is always there when I close my eyes to sleep.”<\/p>\n
Fellow passengers held on to Mr Karovic and pulled him back in, although he remembers very little of the incident.<\/p>\n
“I am lucky,” he said. “My head and neck still hurt, but I am alive.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Staying in a rented villa near Thessaloniki, he is wearing a neck brace for at least six weeks and has been told he could face surgery.<\/p>\n
Mr Karovic\u2019s wife Svetlana, who was seated behind her husband, said they were “eternally grateful” to one passenger who she believes is Albanian for his part in the rescue.<\/p>\n
She told The Guardian: “He did all he could to bring him in and then tried to block the window, first with a bag that was immediately sucked out and then with a suitcase, which worked.”<\/p>\n
In a statement at the time, Ryanair said the plane “returned to Thessaloniki shortly after takeoff when a passenger window dislodged in-flight”.<\/p>\n
They said the plane landed normally and passengers returned to the terminal, and one passenger requested and received medical assistance on the ground in Thessaloniki.<\/p>\n
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the US said on 16 July it was taking over an investigation into the flight.<\/p>\n
The incident occurred in Greek airspace and international aviation rules allow Greece\u2019s Hellenic Air and Rail Safety Investigation Authority to hand the investigation over to the NTSB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A passenger who was partially sucked out of a window during a Ryanair flight said “the noise before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-562179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}