Newly surfaced footage from inside a Ryanair Boeing 737 captures the desperate moment fellow passengers held onto a 61-year-old Serbian businessman after a blown engine sent debris through his cabin window mid-flight.
The video, filmed by passenger Sofia Lavou, shows shattered glass, wind tearing through the fuselage, oxygen masks deployed, and multiple passengers physically restraining Ljubisa Karovic, who had been pulled up to his shoulders through the opening in seat 11F. The footage emerged weeks after the flight from Thessaloniki, Greece, to Memmingen, Germany, became one of the most harrowing commercial aviation incidents in recent memory.
Karovic, a father of two, now wears a neck brace and is recovering in the Greek city of Katerini. He sustained burns on his back and right hand, temporary paralysis, a swollen head, and damage to his right ear and eye. His head and right arm were exposed to winds estimated at 370 miles per hour while the aircraft traveled at altitude.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board issued a preliminary report identifying the root cause as an "engine fan-blade-out failure", meaning a blade inside one of the jet's engines broke apart shortly after takeoff. Broken engine parts are believed to have smashed the cabin window, triggering sudden decompression.
The NTSB's preliminary findings lay out a sequence that raises hard questions about the crew's initial response. At 16,000 feet, pilots received a "high vibration" alert from the right engine. They reduced engine power and ran through what the report calls the "Engine High Vibration non-normal checklist." The vibration readings dropped, and the crew resumed climbing on autopilot.
That decision preceded disaster. Shortly after, engine fires increased dramatically, the crew heard a loud bang, and the cabin altitude warning sounded. Only then did the flight crew declare an emergency, don oxygen masks, and begin an immediate descent.
Whether the crew's choice to continue climbing after the initial vibration alert contributed to the window failure is among the open questions investigators have yet to resolve. The NTSB report does not assign blame, and no final report has been published. But the timeline, engine alert, checklist, resumed climb, then catastrophic failure, is stark.
The broader incident first drew global attention when initial reports described a passenger partially ejected from a commercial aircraft, a scenario most travelers assume belongs to Hollywood, not a European budget carrier.
Eleni Kyranou, 33, sat next to Karovic when the window blew. She grabbed his arm as the pressure differential pulled him outward. Other passengers rushed to help. The struggle to hold him lasted what witnesses believe was up to two minutes, an eternity at that altitude and speed.
Kyranou later told 60 Minutes Australia that the experience still haunts her.
"I did what I could to help a person, to save a life. But it still haunts me, the images and the sound has stayed with me."
That account aligns with what Karovic's wife, Svetlana, and his lawyer have said publicly. The New York Post reported that the family disputes Ryanair's claim that cabin crew performed well during the emergency, alleging it was fellow passengers, including a man believed to be Albanian, who pulled Karovic back inside and blocked the shattered window with a suitcase.
Ryanair has not issued a detailed public statement addressing those allegations, at least not in any reporting available. The airline's subsidiary Malta Air operated the Boeing 737 on the route.
Karovic himself has described the psychological toll in blunt terms.
"Now everything is bothering me. Mentally, I have hit rock bottom. It has an effect on both my work and family. It is a complete upheaval in my life."
In his earlier public account, Karovic described the sound that preceded the decompression as the detail he cannot escape: "The explosion is what I remember. It's the noise before the chaos, the noise that is always there when I close my eyes to sleep."
His lawyer, Vasilis Tsiaras, put the physical reality in plain terms: "At 15,000 feet he ended up with his head and right arm outside the aircraft as it moved at a speed of more than 600km/h. Imagine that." Karovic requires a neck brace for six weeks and may need surgery. He suffered serious burns and bruises on his right arm from armpit to chest.
Karovic's first full account of the ordeal made clear that his survival owed more to his seatbelt and the quick action of strangers than to any airline protocol.
The video itself exists because Lavou made a grim calculation in real time. She believed the aircraft was going down.
"We put on our oxygen masks, and you suddenly feel like the plane is falling because you feel like you're falling, like the plane is falling. So that's why we all thought we were going to die, so I needed proof. So I said, if I'm going down, at least I will have proof of what happened."
Her footage, shaky, loud with rushing air, showing passengers clinging to Karovic, is the most direct visual record of what happened inside that cabin. It is the kind of evidence that investigators, lawyers, and the public rarely get from a decompression event at altitude.
The NTSB's investigation into the incident remains ongoing. No final determination of fault has been published. The agency's preliminary report confirmed the fan-blade-out failure but left unresolved how the engine debris path led to a cabin window breach, and whether the crew's decision to resume climbing after the initial vibration alert was consistent with standard operating procedures.
Karovic's legal team has indicated the family is seeking compensation beyond what Ryanair has offered. So far, the airline's communication with the family has reportedly focused on rebooking, not on addressing the injuries, the crew's actions, or the mechanical failure that nearly cost a man his life.
That posture fits a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched budget carriers manage liability after serious incidents. Minimize public comment, defer to investigators, and let the legal process grind forward while the passenger bears the physical and financial burden.
Aviation emergencies have become an unsettling drumbeat in recent months. A Delta flight was evacuated by emergency slides in Atlanta after smoke forced an emergency landing, and a young flight instructor made national news after landing on a Florida highway when her engine failed. Each incident raises the same core question: whether the systems, maintenance standards, and crew protocols passengers depend on are keeping pace with the volume and cost pressures of modern commercial aviation.
Karovic survived because strangers in the next seat chose to act. The airline, the manufacturer, and the regulators now owe those passengers, and every future passenger, a full accounting of how a fan blade failure turned a routine European flight into a near-death event. So far, that accounting has not arrived.
