A flight attendant was 'absolutely certain' passengers had been sucked out of the hole in the Boeing 737 disaster.
The incident took place on an Alaska Air Flight that was leaving Portland bound for Ontario, California, when a loud boom was heard on board the plane.
A gaping hole was left in the side of the aircraft, which was forced to make an emergency landing back into Portland.
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Once it landed safely, flight attendants tried to find out if anyone had been injured.
One flight recalled to National Transportation Safety Board investigators seeing five empty seats near the hole and feared that people had been sucked out of the Boeing 737 MAX.
They said: “At the point where I first saw the hole, I saw five empty seats.
“So I was absolutely certain that we had lost people out of the hole and that we had casualties.”
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It was uncovered this week through the board’s documents that it was a wrongly installed panel which had blown off the plane as it departed Portland.
Extensive interviews with the crew shed some light on just what happened after the explosive decompression including details about the passengers onboard, which included a screaming mother and an unaccompanied five-year-old boy.
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The flight started off seemingly normal but it was as the plane climbed past 16,000 feet that things took a turn.
Crew members described hearing what sounded like a hissing sound at first before what seemed like the boom of a cannon.
One flight attendant said “it was like an eternity of just disbelief”.
It was when a woman’s hair was seen to be blowing in the wind that they realized there was a chunk of the plane missing.
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One colleague became emotional, saying: “we lost passengers, we lost passengers out the window”.
Another recalled: “We had to just use our own intuition and that involved taking a risk, it involved us saying ‘is it safe for us to get up?’ We don’t know.
“What we know is there’s a tiny little boy who might need oxygen and so we were motivated to just, I guess, put that individual’s safety above ours in the moment because we just didn’t know what else to do.”
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The plane landed back in Portland and as it moved toward the gate, one flight attendant ran towards the hole and shouted: “Is everybody here? Do we have everybody here?”
Luckily, everyone was accounted for.