CEO Michael O’Leary tells reporters the businessman was sucked ‘towards’ but not out of the opening
Ryanair has said it will be “disputing” that any part of a passenger’s body was sucked outside when a window on one of its aircraft broke while in flight.
US investigators are examining the incident which left Ljubisa Karović, 61, severely injured when the window beside him shattered on a Ryanair flight from Greece to Germany in July.
Karović’s lawyer said the Serbian businessman was hauled back in after his head and right arm were sucked through the window due to the sudden depressurisation.
However, Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, said the airline would be “disputing” that account, telling reporters after the airline’s annual meeting in Dublin on Thursday that Karović was “certainly sucked towards the window, but he didn’t get out the window”.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the US is leading an accident investigation, with Boeing’s 737 plane and the engine manufacturer GE as well as Ryanair involved.
O’Leary said: “He wasn’t partially out the window. Part of his face didn’t get out the window.
“We don’t think any part of his body got out the window, but he was certainly sucked in very dramatic circumstances towards the window.”
He said the passenger had been “belted into the seat”, adding: “We will be certainly at the end of the process disputing that he or any part of his anatomy will bend out the window.”
O’Leary said he was “not trying to downplay it” and the airline would “have to await the outcome of the NTSB report”.
In an interview with the Guardian, Karović said he believed his seatbelt had kept him in the plane as he blacked out, while his wife, Svetlana, said one passenger played a crucial part in his rescue, as she watched her husband “half in and out of the plane”.
She said the unknown passenger, believed to be Albanian, “did all he could to bring him in and then tried to block the window, first with a bag that was immediately sucked out and then with a suitcase, which worked”.
The comments came before an AGM in which about a third of shareholders voted against O’Leary’s latest pay deal, potentially worth €150m (£129m). The package, agreed over the summer, would give him options on 10m shares if he hits profit and share price targets and stays at the helm of the Irish carrier until 2032.
Ryanair said it would later publish the results of the votes, which approved the deal by about 2-1.
O’Leary also continued to dispute the account of the air traffic control provider Nats over the reasons for the latest failure on Tuesday, which disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers flying in and out of the UK and cancelled more than 2,100 flights.
Martin Rolfe, the Nats boss, told the BBC on Tuesday: “This will be something we haven’t seen in more than 50 years of operation.”
Continuing his long vendetta against Rolfe, O’Leary accused him of “telling lies to save his own skin”.
A Ryanair spokesperson said Nats had told a call with its teams on Tuesday that the reason was a “spurious flight plan”. A flight plan caused an outage in 2023.
Nats said the problem occurred in its flight processing system but was not the same fault as the issues that caused outages and mass disruption in 2023 and 2025.
O’Leary stoked further outrage by comparing his competitors to “rapists”, a term he had used since the 2000s but less often publicly in recent times.
He told reporters people were “desperate to get to Ryanair’s low fares because they can’t afford to fly with the high-fare rapists around Europe”. After repeating the “high-fare rapists” comments, and challenged whether this was appropriate language, O’Leary told reporters: “Absolutely.”
