Pilot 'sucked halfway out' of plane after windscreen broke at 32,000 feet A Chinese passenger jet was forced to make an emergency landing after the co-pilot was ‘sucked halfway out’ of the cockpit after the windscreen shattered in mid-air. Speaking to the Chengdu Economic Daily, Captain Liu Chuanjian said that the aircraft had just reached an altitude of 32,000 feet when the windscreen smashed.

There was no warning sign. Suddenly the windscreen just cracked and made a loud bang. The next thing I know my co-pilot had been sucked halfway out of the window,” he is reported to have said.上海到廣州機票 "Everything in the cockpit was floating in the air. Most of the equipment malfunctioned... and I couldn’t hear the radio. The plane was shaking so hard I could not read the gauges.” Because he was wearing a seatbelt, the co-pilot was pulled back into the cockpit - sustaining only scratches to his face and a sprained wrist. One other member of cabin crew was injured in the descent, but none of the 119 passengers were hurt.

The temperature of the cockpit is reported to have dropped to minus 40 degree Celsius, forcing the plane to descend rapidly for five to six seconds before the pilot grabbed an oxygen mask and managed to manually regain control.The Sichuan Airlines flight departed from the central Chinese municipality of Chongqing at 6.30am on Monday morning, due to arrive in Lhasa, Tibet at 9.30am.

It made the emergency landing at Shuangliu International Airport in Chengdu, 250 miles west of Chongqing, half an hour after take-off. Sichuan Airlines is a regional airline based in Chengdu; it mainly operates domestic flights, but also has international routes to Canada, Japan and the Czech Republic.

The incident comes just weeks after a woman died on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas when part of the engine broke off, shattered a window and nearly sucked her out. Mrs Riordan, a banking executive, was pulled back into the aircraft by other passengers, who attempted to resuscitate her, but she later died of her injuries. With two high-profile instances of cracked windows on planes in a month, how does this happen, how frequently do windscreens shatter, and what is the protocol for pilots in these emergency incidents?

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