Jet’s windshield shatters; co-pilot hurt

HONG KONG — A Sichuan Airlines plane heading for Tibet made an emergency landing Monday after its windshield shattered and a co-pilot was partially sucked out of the cockpit, local news agencies reported.

Flight 8633 left the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing at 6:26 a.m. and was scheduled to land at 9:05 a.m. in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, about 1,500 miles west, according to the flight tracking website FlightView.com.

But the windshield on the Airbus A319 later “shattered with a loud sound,” the pilot, Liu Chuanjian, said in a video posted by the news outlet Chengdu Business News. “When I looked over to my side, half of my co-pilot’s body was hanging out of the window.”

“Fortunately, he was wearing a seat belt,” Liu said. The plane made an emergency landing at 7:42 a.m. in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu.

Later Monday, Sichuan Airlines said in a post on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform, that 29 of the plane’s 119 passengers were sent to a hospital for examination. One cabin crew member was being treated for a waist injury and the first officer suffered scratches, but the remaining passengers were discharged, the post said.

The Sichuan Airlines incident is at least the world’s second broken-window incident of the year aboard a commercial plane.

In April, when an engine exploded in midair on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas, a gust of shrapnel blew out a window in the cabin and partially sucked a 43-year-old woman headfirst into the sky, killing her.

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