The Chinese co-pilot who went out the window of an airplane at 10,000 meters and survived

Everything indicated that it would be a routine flight, one more among the hundreds that cross the skies of China every day.

But suddenly, Captain Liu Chuanjian, flying an Airbus A319 between the cities of Chongqing and Lhasa in Tibet, he heard a sound that shook the entire cabin.

"There was no warning signal, the windshield was broken, it hit hard, the next thing I knew was that my partner had been sucked," he told the Chengdu Economic Daily.

In the middle of the flight, almost 10,000 meters high, one of the windows of the cabin broke and the co-pilot saw half of his body outside the aircraft.

It was for several minutes like this, exposed to very low temperatures and lack of oxygen.

It was saved by a hair, that is, by the belt: the security device did not allow the petty officer to be totally sucked out of the cabin.

But while the copilot tried to save his life, the plane lost height abruptly, the pressure and temperature in the cabin decreased and the equipment began to fail.

"Everything inside the plane was floating in the air, I could not hear the radio, the plane was shaking so hard I could not read the indicators," the captain added.

The flight

The incident occurred at the time that breakfast was served on flight 3U8633 of Sichuan Airlines.

But suddenly the plane rushed to 7,000 meters in a few minutes.

"We did not know what was going on and we panicked. Oxygen masks dropped ... We experience a few seconds of free fall before it stabilized again," said one of the passengers to China News Service.

But according to the Civil Aviation Administration of the Asian country there was no major damage: the copilot only suffered a sprain in the wrist and facial cuts and another member of the cabin crew had a slight injury to the waist by a fall.

Finally, the plane landed emergency with the 119 passengers unharmed.

What happened after?

Some passengers were taken for check-ups to a hospital and others took other flights in the afternoon to their destinations.

The captain, meanwhile, was widely praised on social networks for managing to control the plane and land it after the incident.

The #ChinaHeroPilot tag was a trend on the local Weibo microblog site, with 160 million views and 17.8 million comments.

But while some asked for a prize for the pilot, others also demanded greater security controls.

Airbus and the French aerial accident investigation agency sent equipment to China to investigate the incident.

The incident took place two months after a woman died in the United States after being partially sucked through the window of an airplane, whose engine exploded in the air.

Fractures of the windscreen of the cabin are relatively common incidents and can be caused by lightning or by what they call "bird strike", when the birds crash into the plane in flight.

However, the loss of a complete window, as happened on this flight, is very rare, according to experts.