Passengers on an Asiana Airlines flight experienced minutes of panic after a man who was sitting in an emergency row opened the aircraft door when the plane was 213 meters above the ground. According to CNN, the hatch opened as the aircraft was preparing to land on Friday, May 26 in Daegu, South Korea. The man said he felt lack of air and wanted to get off, Yonhap news agency reported.
During police questioning, the man said he was stressed after losing his job, according to the report from Yonhap. “He is mentally struggling right now and losing his footing. We could not investigate him properly due to his state,” a local police officer told reporters.
In a video that went viral on social media, it was possible to see as the wind whipped through the cabin, passengers holding on to their armrests. An airline official said that the aircraft was about two or three minutes away from landing in the city located 240 kilometers south of Seoul.
According to local police, the man in his 30s was arrested at Daegu airport in connection with the incident. A total of 200 people were on board the flight, including 194 passengers, as reported by Asiana Airlines. The Daegu Fire Department said that 12 people suffered minor injuries due to hyperventilation and 9 of them were sent to Daegu hospitals.
Geoffrey Thomas, aviation expert at Airline Ratings, described the incident as very strange. “Technically, it’s not possible to open those doors in flight,” he told CNN. “It seems implausible that the door could open in the first place and then against the airstream, technically impossible, but one way or another it has happened.”
The plane was identified on the tracking website Flightradar24 as an Airbus 321, as reported by CNN. It was flying from Jeju Island, off the southern coast of South Korea, to Daegu. According to Yonhap news agency, among the passengers were teenage athletes who were on their way to a track and field competition. Some of them screamed and cried in panic.
Other passengers, according to the agency, commented that they suffered severe ear pain after the door opened. Several cabin crew members shouted for help from passengers to prevent the door from opening.
