PORTLAND, Ore. — A teenager lost his shirt and some of his personal effects when a door plug blew out on an Alaska Airlines flight leaving Portland on Friday evening. A passenger who spoke with him after it happened said that his seatbelt likely saved his life.
Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 departed from Portland International Airport (PDX), at 4:52 p.m., to Ontario, California on Friday. It then had to make an emergency landing after a door plug on the plane blew out about 15 minutes into the flight, leaving a gaping hole and causing a rapid decompression of the cabin. None of the 171 passengers and six crew members aboard were seriously injured.
The plane had just passed 10,000 feet when a passenger on the flight, Kelly Bartlett, said she heard a loud boom and then the cabin filled with wind and noise.
"I heard the chaos, I didn’t know what was happening," said Bartlett, who was seated ahead of the hole, in row 23. "You’re grabbing your mask and you’re just trying to figure out what is going on. It’s panic inducing, it’s just really stressful. And then in the midst of all of this, someone jumps over me and flops down in the middle seat and grabs the mask and puts it on."
In the empty seat next her now sat a teenage boy.
"He didn’t have a shirt on and it was all very confusing, I was like, 'Where did you come from?'" Bartlett said.
The teen had been sitting in the middle seat of row 20, one seat away from the door plug. When it blew out, the sudden depressurization sucked his shirt from his body. Bartlett said that the teen's seatbelt saved his life. He was buckled in, and his mom helped pull him back from the hole.
"I wasn’t in that row and I was so scared when we heard that boom and the masks came down — that was scary alone, so I cannot imagine what he or his mom are going through," Bartlett said.
His skin was red in spots, most likely from the wind, and there were some cuts on his body, she added.
It was too loud in the plane to talk or hear anything. Using the notes app on her phone to type, combined with hand gestures, Bartlett confirmed that the boy was OK. His phone and laptop had flown out of the plane, but his bag ended up “tumbling around the aisle” and eventually made its way back to him in his new seat, which had an extra shirt he could wear.
Bartlett said the boy and his mother, who had also moved to a new seat but in a different row, were reunited when the plane landed. Paramedics came aboard and took care of a few passengers with minor injuries.
All the passengers then exited the plane as normal through the jetway, Bartlett said, but not before the boy wanted a selfie “to commemorate the experience.”
"People have said if we were at a higher elevation, it could’ve been so much worse," Barlett said. "And it still could’ve been worse if (the teen) hadn’t had his seatbelt on or something. And so I feel really lucky that it happened the way that it did."