Serbian passenger nearly sucked out of Ryanair window
On a morning Ryanair flight from Thessaloniki to Memmingen a window came away, the cabin lost pressure, and a Serbian passenger was saved by his wife and fellow travellers.
- On a morning Ryanair flight on 10 July from Thessaloniki to Memmingen, a window came away over North Macedonia.
- The cabin lost pressure suddenly, oxygen masks dropped, and a 61-year-old Serbian passenger was partly pulled outside.
- His wife grabbed his legs while fellow travellers hauled him back into the aircraft together.
- The pilot turned the plane back to Thessaloniki, where the injured man was taken to hospital in a stable condition.
The story that has been circulating in the world’s newsrooms since Friday morning, from CNN to the BBC, has a very concrete Serbian angle: the man who escaped death by a hair at several thousand metres is a citizen of Serbia. On a morning flight operated by the low-cost carrier Ryanair from Thessaloniki’s “Macedonia” airport to Memmingen in Germany, an airport close to Munich, a 61-year-old passenger was sitting by the window when something happened that commercial aviation treats as extremely rare.
Shortly after take-off, while the aircraft was over North Macedonia, the window came away from the fuselage. According to Greek media, the window was damaged by debris that had broken off one of the aircraft’s engines. Sudden cabin decompression followed, the pressure dropped sharply, and the oxygen masks fell in front of shaken passengers. The man sitting right by the window was partly sucked outside, head first, up to his shoulders.
How did fellow passengers pull him back in?
What followed would struggle to pass as believable in a film script. The injured man’s wife grabbed him by the legs and held on while the other passengers, working together, dragged him back into the cabin. Travellers on the flight described scenes of panic, and fellow passengers said screams could be heard through the cabin. Those few seconds decided one man’s life.
Once the crew grasped the scale of the situation, the pilot changed course and decided to return to the airport in Thessaloniki. The plane landed safely and the passengers were disembarked. The injured Serbian citizen was taken to a hospital in Thessaloniki, where doctors recorded friction burns and a neck injury. The man is conscious, in a state of shock, and his condition is assessed as stable.
Footage from inside the aircraft, showing the chaos in the cabin, quickly went viral and raised the question of safety on the low-cost flights that hundreds of thousands of Balkan travellers rely on. For the Serbian public the story also has a practical dimension: routes via Thessaloniki and Germany’s regional airports have for years been popular among Serbian citizens, both because of the price and because of the proximity of the diaspora in Bavaria.
What does this incident mean for Balkan travellers?
Serbia’s Consulate General in Thessaloniki also issued a statement, giving the case an official diplomatic dimension. The consular service is monitoring the condition of the injured citizen and remains in contact with the Greek authorities and the family. There is as yet no official confirmation of exactly what caused part of the engine to break away, and incidents of this kind routinely trigger a detailed technical investigation that can last for months.
Until the inquiry is complete, one image will not fade easily: a man dragged halfway through an aircraft window, and a wife holding his legs until fellow passengers manage to pull him back inside. As passengers who routinely board planes without a second thought, how aware are we really of how thin the line is between an ordinary flight and disaster?
