 The emergency began with a bang three miles above Oregon, the first six minutes of Friday's Alaska Airlines flight 1-2-8-2 from Portland to Southern California's Ontario International Airport had been routine, the Boeing 737 MAX-9 about halfway to its cruising altitude and traveling at more than 400 mph.as the plane climbed. The cabin's air pressure steadily increased, a normal occurrence in comparison to the rapidly thinning air outside, the plane's four flight attendants and 171 passengers sat. Strapped in their seats, nearly filling its 178 passenger capacity, then boomed on a two-foot by four-foot piece of fuselage covering an unoperational emergency exit behind the left wing blew out, the force of the cabin air being sucked outside in a deafening rush twisted the metal bracing holding the seats next to the hole and ripped off their headrests, which by fate, were two of the few unoccupied seats. We had just reached the altitude where they say you can turn on your devices, it's okay, so it must have been about 10,000 feet and we were still ascending, so a couple minutes after they made that announcement, we just all heard there was just a really loud boom which was so startling and the plane just filled with wind and air and it's just crazy because that shouldn't happen, right, you know something's wrong and you don't know what, I didn't know where the air was coming from, the oxygen masks dropped, everyone knew what to do, we just grabbed the masks but it was just really unnerving because we knew something was wrong, we didn't know what, we didn't know how serious, we didn't know if it meant we were gonna crash, I mean it was just something was wrong and we didn't have any information so it was a really scary situation to be in because it was noisy, it was very windy and just loud from, you could hear the engine from outside the plane and just air circulating inside the plane because it was just like wind was just coming in, so yeah it was cool, I wouldn't say cold, it wasn't uncomfortably cold, it was just cool and windy which is, again, not what you want on your flight and the kid jumped over me and sat there and grabbed his mask and put it on and it was all happening so fast and it was confusing, I didn't know where he came from, I didn't know what seat he was in, where he was before that, I didn't know why he didn't have a shirt on because his shirt got sucked off of his body when the panel blew out because of the pressure and it was his seat belt that kept him in his seat and saved his life and there he was next to me and I could see his skin was red and he had some cuts on him so I just didn't understand what was happening and he got buckled in, he had his mask on, I know that they reseeded his mom somewhere else and then eventually I didn't see the flight attendants anymore so I knew that it was taken care of and they were seated and they were saved too and then I started talking with him, we had our masks on and the plane was really loud so we couldn't talk but I had a note app on my phone that I was typing on so I typed to him and I asked him if he was hurt and if he had been in that seat where the window blew out, it wasn't just the window it was that whole panel and I just couldn't believe he was sitting there and what he must have gone through, what he must have been feeling at the time because I was scared and I wasn't, I wasn't the one sitting right there so anyway we talked on our phones a little bit just because we couldn't speak and he let me know that he was okay physically and that his mom was okay too and so he didn't say too much but I just wanted to make sure he wasn't hurt. I'm just so thankful and I don't know I just, I just really I'm glad that it is not any worse than it was that's all, I keep coming back to it like how lucky Jack, that was his name, the kid who sat next to me, his name was Jack and how lucky he was for that he had a seatbelt on like I take my seatbelt off when they say you're free to take your seatbelt off and walk around the cabin and they hadn't said that I'm not saying that but like that's something that I would do is just take it off because it's more comfortable but he had his on and it saved his life.