Dr. Cecilia Laguzzi was sleeping on an overnight trip back to Uruguay with her two children. She said that bad turbulence woke her up, and she found her 2-year-old son stuck in the ceiling above the overhead compartment.
“It was a sight I will never forget,” Laguzzi told “Good Morning America” after what happened on the Air Europa trip. The airline said that several passengers were thrown toward the ceiling of the cabin.
Early Monday morning, the flight from Madrid to Montevideo, Uruguay, had “heavy” turbulence. The airline said that the flight was moved to Brazil “due to the nature of the turbulence and for safety reasons.” It said that the plane landed safely at Natal International Airport in São Gonçalo do Amarante and that several passengers were taken to the hospital with major injuries.
Laguzzi, a surgeon, said she was traveling with her husband and their two young children on their way home from a three-month internship in Barcelona when she woke up being hit by things she didn’t recognize.
“I felt something very hard hitting my head and then my back, and I fell on my head, and I couldn’t get up at first,” she shared. “I remember I was in the plane, and I could feel it like falling, like free falling, for what felt like an eternity.”
Laguzzi thinks that after six or seven seconds, the plane went back to normal. That’s when she started looking for her kids, who were sleeping next to her husband a few seats away. She found her four-year-old daughter with her husband, but she couldn’t find her son in the “chaotic” mess of people and bags on the plane’s floor.
“We were trying to find him on the floor and started screaming his name until someone told me, ‘Are you looking for a baby?’ and I said, Yes,” she shared. “He said, ‘Well, it’s up there,’ and he pointed up, and the minute I look up he was there crying, looking at us.”
Laguzzi said that their son was found above the luggage area, where pieces of plastic had broken off. Her husband was able to get him back.
“I’ll never forget how I felt in that moment,” she stated. “He was crying, he was very scared, and we were all very scared as well, but the moment I took him in my arms, he calmed down.”
Laguzzi said she checked him out and thought he was fine. A “little bruised up,” but otherwise fine, she said about her family.
Officials say that forty people were hurt, and some of them were badly hurt. The airport revealed to ABC News Monday night that 30 people got medical care at the airport and 10 had to be taken to the hospital for further testing.
As of Tuesday morning, seven people were still in the hospital in serious but not life-threatening conditions, Air Europa told ABC News.
Laguzzi said she went to help other people on the plane after a flight attendant asked for a doctor.
“Most of the people I saw had severe back pain from the trauma, but I also saw some fractures — legs, shoulders, collarbone, nose fracture,” she told me. “As these plastic panels fell down, they fell on people and they fell on their faces, arms and such.”
Afterwards, Laguzzi said, a member of the crew asked her if she thought the plane should make an emergency landing in Brazil or keep going to its end destination in Uruguay, which was four hours away. The doctor told the crew to land right away so that the hurt person could get care right away, she said.
The plane asked for an emergency landing at 2:32 a.m. Monday, according to the Natal airport. Laguzzi said that as soon as the plane arrived, first responders began categorizing the patients. She said that after sitting for several hours on the plane and then in the airport, people began taking buses to Recife to continue their trip to Montevideo.
Laguzzi said, “I just wanted to get home, whatever it took.” She was a little scared to get back on a plane. She said that the family got back home Tuesday morning.
Air Europa said that the event is still being looked into.
Based on what former Marine Corps fighter pilot and ABC News contributor Col. Steve Ganyard said, the plane flew through the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which is where a belt of thunderstorms can be found.
She described the whole event as “traumatizing,” and she has no plans to fly “for a long time.”
“It was very hard to be in these situations,” she noted. “You know, having little kids makes you feel so useless. You wish you could do more, but everything is too much for you to handle.
She said there are two things to keep in mind about instability.
“One is the airplane is very, very strong,” he noted. “The second is that people who wear seatbelts don’t get hurt.” People who aren’t wearing seat belts are the only ones who get hurt.
