Police detained a 33-year-old man suspected of throwing the door open, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported. Police mentioned the person confessed to opening the door however wouldn’t say why he did it.

South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport mentioned in a press release that any one who breaches the Aviation Security Act — actions that embody passengers working doorways, exits or gear inside an plane — may very well be prosecuted and sentenced to as much as 10 years in jail.

“I thought the plane was going to explode. … It looked like passengers next to the open door were fainting,” a passenger informed Yonhap.

In a video that appeared to have been captured by a passenger and shared broadly on social media and distributed by Reuters, wind whips the plane’s cabin, battering passengers and sending unsecured cloth flapping.

Nick Wilson, an affiliate professor of aviation on the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, defined that an plane’s exits are designed to stay in place whereas withstanding vital strain hundreds. “They’re basically stuck in there,” he mentioned.

Along with different plane methods, the sealed doorways and emergency exits maintain the cabin pressurized at altitude. Without cabin pressurization, passengers could not have the ability to get sufficient oxygen and will lose consciousness. In the occasion of a speedy decompression at excessive altitude, he mentioned, “you’re going to have some degradation in your ability to make coherent, useful choices.”

At lower altitudes, the pressure between the inside and outside of the plane decreases. At this point in the flight, the force on the door is not as strong.

“This individual appears to have been able to open a door on approach,” Wilson mentioned. “At a lower elevation, there’s less differential pressure. That would be one of the important factors that allowed this door to be opened at all.”

Flight attendants tried but failed to stop the man, Yonhap reported. “Flight attendants shouted for help from male passengers and people all around clung to him and pulled him in,” a witness told the news agency.

The plane was carrying 200 folks, together with 194 passengers, South Korean shops reported.

The airline’s workplace on the Daegu International couldn’t instantly be reached for remark.