Holed plane makes emergency landing

Passengers on a US flight which made an emergency landing at a military base after a sudden drop in cabin pressure took dramatic pictures of a hole in the aircraft.

The National Transportation Safety Board said yesterday an “in-flight fuselage rupture” forced the plane to make the emergency landing.

Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Los Angeles, said the pilot of the Southwest Airlines plane “made a rapid, controlled descent from almost 11,000 metres 3,400 metres after the incident occurred”.

Some passengers aboard the flight from Phoenix, Arizona, to Sacramento, California, said a hole in the cabin caused a rapid descent.

“It dropped pretty quick,” said Brenda Reese, who provided mobile phone photographs of the cabin damage in the Boeing 737. The pictures show a panel hanging open in a section above the plane’s middle aisle, with a hole of about two metres long.

“It’s at the top of the plane, right up above where you store your luggage,” Ms Reese said by telephone.

“The panel’s not completely off. It’s like ripped down, but you can see completely outside... When you look up through the panel, you can see the sky.”

Ms Reese said the plane had just left Phoenix Sky Harbour International Airport when she awoke after hearing a “gunshot-like sound” in the cabin and oxygen masks dropped for passengers.

Dallas, Texas-based Southwest said there were no injuries among the 118 people aboard, but Ms Reese said “there were some people who were passing out because they weren’t getting the oxygen”.

She said a flight attendant’s oxygen did not work and that he fell and suffered a bloody nose and there was “no real panic” among the passengers, who applauded the pilot after he emerged from the cockpit following the emergency landing.