An inflatable evacuation chute unexpectedly forced a United Airlines plane to make an emergency landing in Witchita, Kansas on Sunday.
Flight 1463 was on its way to Southern California's John Wayne Airport from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago when the safety tool suddenly sprang out, an hour and a half into the aircraft's journey, according to The Chicago Tribune.
This led the fuselage's pilot to notify officials at Witchita's control tower of the problem, which caused no major issues for any of the 96 passengers and five crewmembers on board the flight.
"Everything's fine, just the door light," the pilot told dispatchers. "We're trying to get to the ground, have somebody look at it. But everybody's fine."
"No one was injured and the flight and landed safely," stated Christen David, director of corporate communications at United Airlines.
United Airlines arranged for passengers to stay in motels before re-booking them on flights Monday morning.
"We've been flying for years, I've never seen this before," said Mike Shroeder, a puzzled passenger on his way back home to California.
"I turned around to the back and that slide that would normally go outside the plane so you can slide down in an emergency had for some odd reason deployed inside the plane while we were flying," Shroeder told The Witchita Eagle. "Fortunately nobody was back there."
John Nance, an aviation consultant indicated that it's "very, very rare...to have an emergency slide deploy inside the airplane, especially if it was spontaneous."
"Freaking out in the back of the plane, help," a frightened passenger tweeted.
"Thankful to be safe and landed on the ground. Little girl in front of me is a trooper," said Twitter user Kelsey Anderson upon the plane's landing.
"Scariest flight of all time," another flyer expressed in a post.
