“It was like an eternity of disbelief.”
Nightmare fuel
As federal regulators conclude their hearing on the Boeing plane door-bursting debacle earlier this year, a flight attendant’s chilling testimony underscores the horror of the entire situation.
The Washington Post reports that an unnamed flight attendant told investigators during testimony before the National Transportation Safety Board that at one point on the Alaska Airlines flight to Portland, she literally had to ask passengers if anyone had been thrown off the plane.
“When I first saw the hole, I saw five empty seats,” the flight attendant told NTSB investigators shortly after the incident, which was described this week during the agency’s hearings on the fiasco. “So I was absolutely certain that we had lost people through the hole and that there were injuries.”
As the newspaper notes, the documents from the regulators’ investigation include thousands of pages of transcripts of interviews with the four Alaska Airlines flight attendants they spoke with during the Jan. 5 incident.
In it, flight attendants described the chaos and panic surrounding the fuselage explosion, from the screaming children and the unaccompanied five-year-old on his very first flight to the horrific feeling of explosive decompression that occurred when the door stopper popped out mid-flight.
Traumatic memory
When the plane finally landed at its destination in Portland, flight attendants busy dealing with the horror scenario were still unsure if anyone had been sucked out when the door flew off. Regulators believe this happened because all four bolts meant to hold the door in place were missing.
The moment the incident occurred also sounds like something out of a horror movie. The flight was proceeding normally and was already at 16,000 feet when a hissing sound preceded a cannon-like boom. Masks on the ceiling fell down and lights came on as panic broke out, flight attendants told the NTSB.
“It was like an eternity of shock,” one of the AA employees told investigators.
As one of the flight attendants tried to figure out what had happened, she looked down the passenger aisles and noticed a woman’s hair blowing in the wind because they had lost the wind – and that’s when she realized there was a hole in the side of the plane.
“‘We lost passengers,'” a flight attendant recalled a colleague saying. “‘We lost passengers through the window.'”
More on the Boeing hearings: Boeing contractors say they were treated like “cockroaches”
