--- title: "Flight Attendants in Boeing Disaster Feared Passengers Had Been Sucked Out Hole in Plane" description: "As regulators wrap up their hearing into the Boeing plane door, one flight attendant's horrifying testimony is highlighting its terror." date: "2024-08-11" modified: "2024-08-11" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/flight-attendants-alaska-airlines-boeing-nightmare" categories: - "Boeing" - "Future Society" - "Space" tags: - "#airlines" - "alaska airlines" - "boeing" - "the digest" --- # Flight Attendants in Boeing Disaster Feared Passengers Had Been Sucked Out Hole in Plane ![]() *\Image: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland via Getty\* ## 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"*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()