A passenger, identified only as Mia on her TikTok profile, went viral after registering a scare aboard a Southwest Airlines flight: she accidentally broke one of the plane’s windows during a flight from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mia guarantees on her account that she’s a short person (just over 5’2″) and only “rejected” her arm at the window. “The moment my elbow applied the slightest pressure as soon as that happened, the whole window shattered, shattered, whole,” he said.
She then called a flight attendant, who immediately informed the flight commander. The pilot checked the pressurization of the entire cabin and concluded that the aircraft’s integrity remained intact and proceeded to Vegas. Mia, in turn, was placed in a new seat by the flight attendant and said she was relieved to learn planes “have three or four windows”.
The traveler refers to the different layers of material that make up an airplane window. According to the site Insider, the layer broken by Mia was just the plastic surface covering the window and therefore the plane did not lose pressure and was able to continue its journey.
Joaquim Martins, a professor of aircraft design at the University of Michigan, also asserted that it is “perfectly normal” for nonstructural parts of the plane to break during flight. If one structural part the outer glass broke, objects would have been sucked out of the window and everyone would have had to put on oxygen masks, he explains.
Eventually, Mia reported that her flight was going to a different destination, but when it landed in Vegas, it was sent for maintenance. The passenger received a US$300 (R$1,538) voucher from the company for her inconvenience, which she can use on a future trip.
The broken window in detail
Image: Playback/TikTok
This isn’t the first time a Southwest Airlines flight has been affected by a broken window incident. In 2018, a passenger died after being partially sucked out of a window that shattered when the plane’s left engine exploded in midair, the New York Times reported at the time.