A United Airlines flight on its way to California from Chicago was forced to make an emergency landing in Wichita, Kansas on Sunday after the plane's emergency evacuation slide opened.
United Airlines Flight 1463 was carrying 96 passengers and five crew members when the emergency slide accidentally deployed. The Boeing 737-300 was at 38,000 feet and had to drop to 11,000 feet due to a loss in cabin pressure. All of the passengers were seated when the incident occurred. No passengers or crew members were injured and the plane was able to land without incident, ABC reports.
Passengers were aware of what was going on. According to passenger Michael David who spoke to ABC News, they could hear a loud pop and then saw the slide deploy, but he says passengers didn't panic.
"It was interesting. Nobody was scared or anything," Davis told ABC. "The captain made an announcement that we're gonna land in Wichita. "He said, 'Don't worry about the emergency trucks, it's just standard procedure.'"
The passengers were provided with local hotel accommodations from United and they were placed on a new flight from Wichita to California on Monday morning.
The airline is investigating the incident and a maintenance team was inspecting the plane to determine how the slide was able to deploy.
Jan Nance, a retired commercial pilot and ABC News aviation consultant said such incident are unusual.
"This is a very, very rare instance to have an emergency slide deploy inside the airplane, especially if it was spontaneous," Nance told ABC.
Although rare, this isn't the first time a flight was forced to make an emergency landing because the slide deployed. In November 2013, a JetBlue fight was forced to land after the evacuation slide was activated. It even happened on then Senator Barack Obama's flight during his 2008 presidential campaign.
