Flight Attendants in Boeing Disaster Feared Passengers Had Been Sucked Out Hole in Plane

"It was like an eternity of just disbelief."

Nightmare Fuel

As federal regulators wrap up their hearing into the Boeing plane door blowout debacle from earlier this year, one flight attendant's horrifying testimony is highlighting the terror of the entire situation.

The Washington Post reports that during testimony before the National Transportation Safety Board, an unnamed flight attendant told investigators that at one point, she literally had to ask passengers aboard the Alaska Airlines flight to Portland if anyone had been ejected from the plane.

"At the point where I first saw the hole, I saw five empty seats," the flight attendant told NTSB investigators soon after the incident, which was recounted during the agency's hearings this week into the fiasco. "So I was absolutely certain that we had lost people out of the hole and that we had casualties."

As the newspaper notes, the document cache from the regulators' investigation includes thousands of pages of interview transcripts with the four Alaska Airlines flight attendants they spoke to in the wake of the January 5 incident.

In them, the attendants detailed the chaos and panic surrounding the fuselage blowout, from the screaming children and unaccompanied five-year-old on his very first flight to the dreadful sensation of the explosive decompression that occurred as the door plug popped out mid-flight.

Traumatic Memory

By the time the plane had landed at its destination in Portland, the attendants who'd been busy trying to manage the nightmare scenario still weren't sure if anyone had been sucked out when the door flew off, which regulators believe occurred due to it missing all four of the bolts that were supposed to keep it in place.

The moment the incident occurred also sounds like something out of a horror film. The flight had been going normally and had ascended 16,000 feet when a hiss preceded a cannon-like boom. Overhead masks fell and lights turned on as panic ensued, the attendants told the NTSB.

"It was like an eternity of just disbelief," one of the AA employees told investigators.

When trying to figure out what had happened, one of the attendants realized when surveying the passenger aisles that a woman's hair was flapping in the wind from blowout — and that was how she realized that there was a whole hole in the side of the plane.

"'We lost passengers,'" an attendant recalled a colleague saying. "'We lost passengers out the window.'"

Luckily, that specific outcome of this worst-case-scenario didn't occur — especially considering that so much has happened with Boeing in the interim.

More on the Boeing hearings: Boeing Contractors Say They Were Treated Like "Cockroaches"