“I saw a child fly” and “it was like The Exorcist”: the dramatic testimonies of the crashed LATAM flight going from Sydney to Chile

An accident occurred on a LATAM airline flight covering the route between Sydney and Santiago de Chile a “technical accident” that caused the plane to sink for a few moments in which he lost height. Inside the doors everything went out of control. As a result, 50 people were injured, of which 13 had to receive care in New Zealand.

Now the first passengers have begun to describe in detail the dramatic moments in which everything went out of control.

“There was no previous turbulence, we just sailed smoothly the whole way. I had fallen asleep and luckily I was wearing my seatbelt and, suddenly, the plane fell (…) I thought I was dreaming. I opened my eyes and he was on the roof of the plane face up looking at me. He was like The Exorcist.“said Brian Jokat, a Canadian passenger who spoke to New Zealand radio station RNZ about how he saw another passenger.

“People flew away because they weren’t wearing a belt. Some people They were pretty hurt. “People were really afraid,” this man said, his voice shaking.

The passengers explained to the local press that the device, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner according to the airline, it rapidly lost altitude while flying over the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand He pushed all the people who were not wearing seatbelts onto the roof.

Flight LA800 “had a technical accident during the journey caused a strong movement“a spokesperson for Chile-based LATAM said, without providing further details.

The plane, bound for Santiago, landed “as scheduled at Auckland Airport”, he added as it had made a stopover there. The spokesperson deeply regretted “the inconvenience caused by this situation”.

Rescue services said they were alerted around 4pm (midnight in Argentina), when the plane began its descent towards Auckland airport, New Zealand’s largest city.

A dozen ambulances and other medical vehicles were deployed to treat the injured.

“Our ambulance crews assessed the conditions of around 50 patients, one of whom was in a serious condition,” Gerard Campbell, of St John’s emergency services, told AFP.

“Twelve patients were transported to hospital,” he added. In a previous statement you had spoken of 13 injured. At least three of them were part of the crew.

As they began to recover, passengers began arriving in Santiago from New Zealand. “There was no turbulence, nothing. Suddenly everything went out and (the plane) He flattened himself on his face, like on a roller coaster, and then came back up“, said Verónica Martínez, a passenger who spoke to the Chilean press upon her arrival at Santiago airport.

“The people who weren’t wearing their seatbelts, who were coming out of the bathroom, the same stewardesses who were walking. What struck me most was that behind me was a woman with a child, and me I saw the child fly. “It was terrible,” she said.

Another passenger, chef Lucas Ellwood, told AFP that everything “happened in an instant”, he told AFP. “The people hitting the ceiling caused the plates to come loose. The man behind me was in the bathroom when it happened, poor guy. He explained to me that it had gone through the ceiling“He added.

What happened on board the LATAM flight?

In some videos broadcast on the NZ Herald page, sees several crew members and passengers tending to an injured woman on the ground of the device, while a message in Spanish is heard from the speakers asking if there is a doctor on board.

This accident comes two months after another model from the American manufacturer Boeing will log a problem.

For this reason, this Wednesday Chilean experts traveled to New Zealand to investigate the “strong tremor”. This was confirmed by Chile’s Directorate General of Civil Aeronautics (DGAC) – which conducts this investigation in coordination with the New Zealand Accident Investigation Commission (TAIC) – in a short statement.

Chilean authorities have not specified when they will have a clear idea of ​​what happened to that plane as it flew in international airspace, although according to Mary Shiavo, former head of the US National Transportation Board, they may have a clear idea of ​​​​this accident in approximately 30 days when the evidence will be analyzed and the preliminary report of what happened will be presented.

“They’ve lost sight of all the instruments of a fully loaded passenger plane, it’s a serious problem,” the aviation lawyer stressed in an interview broadcast today on Radio New Zealand.

While it is suspected that a computer failure occurred, what is clear is that “as soon as you get the information from the black box, the mystery will probably be solved,” Shiavo said.