His story sends shivers down your spine and completely removes the desire to choose the window seat of a plane when traveling. Faye, a mother in her fifties and native of Oregon, has just given a testimony that is barely believable on a daily basis. Seattle Times. The story of the rescue of his 15-year-old son, caught when a door unhooked in mid-flight on Friday, on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9.
The latter was sitting next to her, on the window side, in the row located just in front of the door when it, with a very loud bang, came loose like “a bomb exploding”, leaving a gaping hole in the cabin. The headrest of his son’s chair was first sucked into the vacuum, then his seat began to twist backwards and forwards, sucked into the vacuum. “I reached out and grabbed his body and pulled him over the armrest as he was being grabbed,” Faye said. I was probably as full of adrenaline as I have ever been in my life,” said the courageous mother. Then she “wrapped around his back” and clung to his shoulders, not even realizing that clothes from her son’s top had been torn off.
Helped by a passenger
The teenager’s seat “had moved back so much that I was looking directly out through the hole, into the night sky,” explains the mother. It was another passenger, sitting next to him, who finally managed to place the oxygen masks that had fallen from the ceiling on her face and that of her son. Then the stranger in turn clung to Faye, forming a small human chain clinging to the teenager to try to bring him back to them. “I would just hold him and tell him over and over, ‘It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay, big guy, it’s okay.’ », recalls the mother.
Once the air pressure was reduced, her son was definitively recovered and sheltered a few rows further, the mother realized with anguish what he had escaped. To her great surprise, a flight attendant but also passengers not far from her had no idea of the size of the hole in the plane and even seemed surprised at the sight of it. Eventually, the plane landed safely in Portland, about 15 minutes later, leaving a shocked, but reassured mom.