A man on the SoCal-bound Alaska Airlines plane who was seated right behind a portion of the fuselage that was pulled off the jetliner in mid-air is speaking out and sharing new cell phone video of the incident.
The incident occurred on Jan. 5 after Alaska Flight 1282 departed Portland, Oregon at around 5 p.m. headed for the Ontario International Airport.
Passengers were airborne for about 20 minutes when they reported hearing a loud boom that led to a large door plug being ripped from the plane, leaving a gaping hole at 16,000 feet that caused an “explosive decompression” and suction of freezing air.
Miraculously, no one was sitting in row 26 where the door plug exploded off the plane, but Huy Tran, who recorded harrowing video of the terrifying event, was seated in the middle directly behind the portion of the Boeing 737 Max 9 that came off the aircraft.
“I opened my eyes to a giant hole in the plane and I could see the city lights,” he told KTLA’s Chris Wolfe. “The first few seconds was just pure shock and confusion, ‘Is this really happening?’”
The passenger seated next to him in the window seat, his friend Cuong Tran, had his socks, shoes and cell phone sucked out of the hole in the jetliner. The suction was so strong, it also lifted Cuong’s body above his seat and began to pull his legs toward the gaping hole.
“I was like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ My mind was all over the place,” Cuong said. “The kid, I saw half of his body was sucked out of the airplane too and his clothing and everything else and I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’”
The pilot made an emergency landing back at PDX, and while everyone survived, Cuong suffered bruises and a sprained ankle.
“We couldn’t even talk to each other. I mean, me and Cuong were face to face and we couldn’t hear each other at all because it was so loud,” Huy recalled.
Their friend Tram Vo was seated in row 12 with her family, who all heard the blast and the rush of cold air through the cabin, but they had no idea what had happened.
“I was so scared to look around and at this time, we could still hear the wind coming from the back of the plane,” she said.
Several days after the frightening ordeal, Cuong’s cellphone was found intact on the ground in Portland. It was returned to Alaska Airlines and eventually its rightful owner. It still works.
“Pretty much no damage at all besides some dirt,” Cuong said. “It’s pretty crazy.”
The Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday launched an investigation into the Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners, saying in a statement that, “This incident should have never happened, and it cannot happen again.”
The FAA now joins the National Transportation Safety Board in looking for the cause of the blowout.
In the meantime, every 737 Max 9 with a door plug has been grounded indefinitely.