The explosion is what Ljubisa Karović remembers. The thunderous noise of the window shattering roused him from sleep in seat 11F on the early morning Ryanair flight from Greece to Germany. Then came the chaos, the catastrophe that, 11 days and 11 nights later, still keeps him awake.
The 61-year-old Serbian entrepreneur was partially sucked out of the aircraft when the cabin window dislodged mid-flight. His head and right shoulder were pulled through the opening as the plane moved at more than 600km/h. “I don’t remember much and my head and neck still hurt but I am still alive,” he told the Guardian from the porch of his rented villa in Katerini, Greece. “It could have been the seatbelt, the fact that I was still strapped in. But maybe it is fate.”
“Ljubisa Karović recounts being partially sucked out of a Ryanair window after an explosion mid-flight.”
His wife, Svetlana Grković Maksimović, sitting three rows behind in 14C, rushed forward with two other passengers to grab his legs. “We pulled him back together. His entire face was deformed and blood was pouring from his nose and mouth,” she told BBC Serbia. Karović, heading to Germany for his brother’s birthday, was taken to hospital after the plane made an emergency landing. He has since been discharged but still wears a neck brace.
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said an initial investigation into the 10 July incident suggests “foreign object damage to the engine on takeoff at Thessaloniki” may have caused the window to blow out. He cautioned that they cannot say definitively. The 18-year-old Boeing 737, operated by subsidiary Malta Air, had been fully serviced in the past two years, O’Leary insisted.
Passengers reported hearing “some kind of explosion” on board. Karović’s lawyer, Vasilis Tsiaras, described the father of two as “being alive by mistake”. “Ljubisa dipped in and out of death,” Tsiaras said. “He looked at death, that other world, and came back.”
The US National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. O’Leary expects a draft report in about 28 days. Confirmation of external damage could shift liability between Ryanair and Boeing. For now, Karović is left with the memory of that noise. “It’s the noise before the chaos, the noise that is always there when I close my eyes to sleep.”
