Set off from Greece to Germany to celebrate his brother’s birthday, Ljubisa Karovic ended up with his head and right arm outside the airplane window at an altitude of more than 4,500 meters, while the aircraft was traveling at a speed of over 600 kilometers per hour.
Seated next to the Serbian passenger was his wife, Svetlana, who described the incident as the closest witness. According to her, a man of Albanian origin came to the rescue and was described as “extraordinary” for the skill he showed during those critical moments, KosovaPress reports.
“One man, I think he was an Albanian, was incredible. 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. We are eternally grateful to him.”
Ljubisa Karovic recalls the explosion shortly before he was sucked out of the aircraft from seat 11F on a Ryanair flight. Eleven days later, he is still struggling to sleep at night because he is haunted by the powerful sound of the window shattering that woke him from his sleep that day.
However, Karovic considers himself lucky.
“I am lucky,” he told The Guardian. “My head and neck still hurt but I am still alive. 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,” he concluded.
Lawyer Vasilis Tsiaras describes the father of two, who has a slim build, as a man who is “alive by mistake,” and says that it was passengers, rather than the aircraft crew, who came to his aid.
“Everyone has agreed that the crew was in a state of shock, afraid that the plane was about to crash. It was the other passengers who rallied and gave Ljubisa water,” he said.
Although misinformation has circulated claiming that this is the only incident of its kind, in 1990, Timothy Lancaster, a British Airways pilot, also survived after being partially sucked out of the cockpit when its front windshield detached over Oxfordshire.