The door of a small commercial airplane suddenly burst open mid-air on a flight out of Massachusetts — with video showing stunned passengers sitting next to it as they soared above the sea.
The frightening malfunction sent a dangerous blast of air into the Cape Air flight from Nantucket to Boston roughly 10 minutes after takeoff Monday morning, witnesses and officials said.
“There was just like a rush of noise and air,” passenger Lizbet Carroll Fuller told The Boston Globe. “And then you register, wow, that just flew open right next to me. It was the shock of it at 7 in the morning. “
Fuller — who was sitting in a window seat when part of the main cabin door popped open — first thought she would be sucked out of the Cessna C402, she said.
But the low-flying plane quickly returned to Nantucket Memorial Airport for an emergency landing at 7:15 a.m., a Cape Air spokeswoman told the paper.
Fuller, who was on her way to Virginia for a funeral, nervously burst into laughter when she realized she and everyone else on Cape Air Flight 42 were safe.
“The whole trip had already been a big production and then that was just one more thing of like how is this happening?” she said.
The 10-person aircraft, which reaches speeds of 230 mph, was taken out of service and nobody was injured, the Cape Air spokeswoman said.
The FAA is now investigating what caused the door to fly open.