Seattle – An Idaho man says he’s lucky to be alive after he was sucked partially out of a medical-evacuation airplane 20,000 feet in the air.
Chris Fogg, who lives near Boise, Idaho, is a critical-care nurse with an air-ambulance company. He said he was flying with a patient from Twin Falls, Idaho, to Seattle on Wednesday when he got out of his seat on a two-engine turboprop to fetch a water bottle.
When he sat back down, he heard a loud boom and the window next to him exploded. He hadn’t yet buckled his seat belt, and his head and right arm were sucked out the window.
“My left hand was on the ceiling and was holding me in, and my knees were up against the wall,” said Fogg, 41.
He said he pushed and got enough air between his chest and the window to break the seal. He fell back in his seat, blood pouring from his head.
He said the pilot knew the plane had gone into rapid decompression but didn’t know about the broken window, so he put the airplane into a dive to a safe altitude of 10,000 feet.
Fogg, who said just the patient and the pilot were in the plane with him, rolled over on his hands and knees, breathing hard.
“I kept saying, ‘Don’t pass out, don’t pass out; I have a patient on board, and I have to take care of the patient,”‘ he said.
He said airplane supplies started flying around the plane and out the window.
Fogg said the patient, who saw the whole thing, was not in danger because he was on oxygen. But he said the patient was a Vietnam veteran and told Fogg he had flashbacks of being shot out of the air.
The pilot made an emergency landing in Boise, and Fogg was rushed to the hospital, where he got 13 stitches in his head.
Fogg is 6 feet tall and 220 pounds, which he thinks helped him survive.
“For anyone else, I think he would have been sucked completely out, but for some reason I was spared, and I don’t know why,” he said.
He said the window remains were sent to the Federal Aviation Administration to determine what caused the blowout.
