Passenger nearly sucked out a plane window recalls on-board hell

What happened to Ljubisa Karovic is a story of survival people will be talking about for years.

It’s both horrific and heroic.

It began quietly enough in the beautiful Greek city of Katerini.

Ljubisa and his wife Svetlana had been staying in the area and had planned to fly to Germany to visit family.

On the plane, for the first minutes at least, the flight was routine.

Ljubisa, in seat 11F, was blissfully unaware that the window next to him was about to explode and that he was about to be sucked out of the aircraft.

“We went through hell but every morning when I awake, I say thank God everything ended well,” Svetlana told 60 Minutes.

Ljubisa said God, his wife and people on the plane saved him that day.

“Miracle is that we’re even here,” he said.

One of his saviours was Eleni Kyranou.

On that terrible flight on July 10, it was Ljubisa’s good fortune to have her sitting next to him.

When all hell erupted, the quick thinking 33-year-old grabbed Ljubisa’s arm as the force of the outside air pressure started pulling him out of the aircraft.

It was an extraordinary move, but she said doesn’t feel that way.

“I did what I could to help a person, to save a life,” she said.

“But it still haunts me, the images and the sound has stayed with me.”

What happened on board Ryanair 1879 is so extraordinary, if it wasn’t for Sofia Lavou’s mobile phone footage, no one would believe it.

But she wasn’t filming the horrible moment for notoriety, Sofia was so convinced the plane was about to crash, she wanted her family to know what happened to her in her final moments.

“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,” she said. 

“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 some proof of what happened.”

Safely back on the ground in Katerini, for Ljubisa Karovic, life has never felt more sacred.

He’s fragile and in pain, but he couldn’t be more grateful to be alive.

After the mayhem of the last six weeks, it’s only now that what he and his wife Svetlana went through is starting to sink in.

Watch the full story on 60 Minutes on 9Now.