‘If we die, we die together’: Wife of man sucked from plane window speaks out

The wife of a man whose head and shoulders were sucked out of a Ryanair plane window shortly after takeoff from an airport in Greece has spoken out, telling Greek and Serbian media that half of his body was hanging out of the aircraft.

Svetlana Grković and her husband, Ljubisa Karović, were flying from Thessaloniki in Greece to Memmingen in Germany on Friday when one of the plane’s windows malfunctioned, sucking the man “outside up to his chest,” she told the state-owned Greek news broadcaster ERT.

“He was outside for one and a half to two minutes,” she estimated. “I was sitting in the back, the girl sitting next to him grabbed his hand. Three of us were pulling him in,” she continued, adding that it was “chaos” and that her husband, whose face she said was covered in blood, lost consciousness multiple times while receiving very little assistance from the crew.

She recalled being in the air for about 30 to 40 minutes and both of them dozing off when the window shattered. She said her husband was wearing a seatbelt, which she told ERT “saved his life.”

Since the incident, her husband has been in a state of shock and is recovering from serious injuries, noting that she is also suffering mentally, she told ERT.

The 61-year-old passenger suffered neck and shoulder injuries and friction burns, according to a Greek hospital official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Local Greek media reported that a piece of the plane flew off and broke a window shortly after takeoff on Friday, causing the cabin oxygen masks to drop and sucking one passenger’s head and shoulders out of the window.

In a separate interview with the Serbian news outlet Nova.rs, Grković said the crew instructed passengers to remain calm as people began to panic, and that pilots executed an emergency descent back into Thessaloniki.

She told the outlet she held onto her husband’s legs with all her strength while thinking, “If we’re going to die, we’ll die together,” adding that the forces pulling him out of the window were overwhelming and that she was screaming for help.

Another passenger came over and grabbed him, she recalled, “Without that man, I don’t know whether I could have held him. Together we managed to keep him from being pulled completely out.”

Other people on board told Greek media that they heard a loud bang, that oxygen masks dropped and that the plane began descending, The Associated Press reported last week.

“Most people had fallen asleep, we had closed our eyes. We heard a sound — I’d describe it like a tire bursting … but very loud,” a passenger, identified by the U.S. agency as Christina, told Thessaloniki radio.

Upon landing, Karović received treatment from emergency rescue crews before he was transported to hospital, his wife said.

“I don’t think I’ve even become fully aware of what happened. The most important thing is that he’s alive,” she concluded.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed that a window broke on Friday’s flight and said it was ready to support the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority (HCAA) and the NTSB ​in the investigation.