A passenger was almost sucked out of a Boeing 737 commercial airliner on Friday after a window broke.
The incident took place on a Ryanair flight from Thessaloniki, Greece to Memmingen Airport in Germany, according to the BBC.
The head and shoulders of the passenger, said to be a Serbian citizen in his 60s, were hanging outside the plane for several minutes, witnesses said.
A report from ABC News said the man was in a window seat, citing a Greek doctor who treated him on the tarmac.
😱 Horrifying! A passenger was partially sucked through a shattered plane window at an altitude of 6,000 metres
Shortly after a Ryanair flight from Thessaloniki to Germany took off, a fragment broke off the engine and smashed a window.
The 61-year-old man began to be pulled… pic.twitter.com/cax9KP96pY
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) July 10, 2026
The doctor said the passenger’s wife held her husband’s feet to prevent him from being pulled out of the plane.
A Greek aviation official said the cause was an uncontained engine failure.
Greek and German media accounts said that a window broke after it was struck by a piece of the plane’s engine, according to the BBC.
“We immediately realized there had been a decompression. There were screams… for a moment I thought someone had accidentally opened the emergency door,” Christina, a passenger, said.
Shattered engine & smashed window on Ryanair flight where man was sucked out of plane at 20,000ft in new video
missing engine blade can be seen in the footage, shared by a Ryanair flight attendant.The video also shows damage to the outside of the plane, before panning to a… pic.twitter.com/Rcrgagx1JH
— NYC News 24 🗞️ (@NYCNews24) July 11, 2026
“The masks dropped and there was a strong smell. The head and shoulders of one passenger were outside the window. Fortunately, he hadn’t taken off his seat belt,” she added.
The 18-year-old plane was operated by Malta Air, a subsidiary of Ryanair.
Ryanair said the flight returned “shortly after take-off when a passenger window dislodged in flight.”
“The aircraft landed normally and passengers returned to the terminal. One passenger requested and received medical assistance on the ground in Thessaloniki.”
The victim was receiving treatment at AHEPA University General Hospital in Thessaloniki, the Serbian consulate said, according to Reuters.
In 2018, a similar incident took place on a Boeing 737 flown by Southwest Airlines.
A fan blade on an engine broke and smashed a window, and a 43-year-old passenger died after being partially sucked out of a window.
The National Transportation Safety Board had called on Boeing to redesign the fan cowl structure of its 737 NG models. A 2023 order from the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a redesign by July 2028.
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