An emergency evacuation slide is suspected to have plummeted from an airliner into an Illinois backyard Monday afternoon, according to a local report.
The building accompanying the backyard in Chicago’s Northwest Side sustained a small degree of damage, according to WGN9. Maintenance crews from Chicago O’Hare International Airport later found an emergency slide missing from a United Airlines Boeing 767 aircraft, the outlet reported, citing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
“We heard this loud boom,” local resident Sam Deane told WGN9 about the incident.
“They were just having lunch upstairs in our unit and they just heard a loud boom and I guess it hit the side of the building,” another resident, Patrick Devitt, said, according to the outlet. “The only thing that we were worried about at the beginning was like, oh yeah, it’s real loud, stuff like that and you get used to it, but you never think that something like that is going to happen.”
The 767 safely completed a flight from Zurich, Switzerland, to Chicago on Monday afternoon, WGN9 reported.
A United Airlines’ emergency slide plummeted from the sky and landed into a family’s garden leaving them terrifiedhttps://t.co/5TN3uOpYFD pic.twitter.com/yhGmU7Z4gI
— MirrorUSNews (@MirrorUSNews) July 18, 2023
The debris was removed from the backyard of the home into the street after police arrived, according to the outlet. (RELATED: Plane Crashes In Residential New Jersey Neighborhood, Two People Die: Report)
The 10 crew members and 155 passengers aboard the flight were unharmed in the incident, a United Airlines spokesperson confirmed to WGN9.
An FAA investigation into the incident remains ongoing, the outlet reported.