The doors of a United Airlines plane couldn't have been pushed opened by an inflatable evacuation slide, which unexpectedly expanded while the aircraft was about an hour and a half into its journey Sunday.
According to new information released Monday, Flight 1463 was traveling to Southern California's John Wayne Airport from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago when the slide abruptly sprang out. The aircraft then made an emergency landing in Witchita, Kansas, The Chicago Tribune reported.
The slide might have potentially hurt a passenger close by it, but did not pose a significant threat otherwise, according to The Los Angeles Times. None of the 96 passengers and five crewmembers on board were harmed by the surprise inflation.
"In terms of it actually rupturing the bulkhead or the skin and having the plane decompress, that is extremely unlikely," said Douglas Moss, a commercial airline pilot and owner of AeroPacific. "Other than the immediate danger of it activating, once that was done, there's no real concern."
The fuselage's pilot notified dispatchers of the problem immediately after hearing that the slide had burst open.
"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."
United Airlines arranged for passengers to sleep in motels Sunday night, before putting them on new flights Monday morning.
The incident was a first for at least one passenger on his way back home to California.
"We've been flying for years, I've never seen this before," Mike Shroeder told The Witchita Eagle. "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. Fortunately nobody was back there."
Aviation consultant John Nance also indicated that it's "very, very rare...to have an emergency slide deploy inside the airplane, especially if it was spontaneous."
