The last time an airplane's door broke off on a US flight, 9 passengers were sucked out of the plane

• An Alaska Airlines flight had a door plug blow off its side mid-air on Friday. No one was killed.
• The last time a door blew off mid-flight on a US flight was on United Airlines Flight 811.
• Nine passengers were pulled out of the plane when the fuselage ripped apart.

It was like an airline passenger's worst nightmare.

A door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight over the weekend, forcing the plane to turn around and land.

The cabin was damaged but no one was seriously hurt.

But nine passengers weren't so lucky the last time a plane's door broke off on a US flight over three decades ago.

In the early morning hours of February 24, 1989, Flight 811 was traveling from Honolulu, Hawaii to Sydney, Australia with a stop-over in Auckland, New Zealand.

While the Boeing 747-122 was still ascending from Honolulu, it was suddenly rocked by a loud sound between 22,000 and 23,000 feet in the air, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Seconds later, a cargo door toward the front of the aircraft ripped off, taking with it a massive chunk of the plane's fuselage and leaving a gaping hole in the cabin and cargo area, according to the FAA.

Nine passengers in that section of the plane were pulled out into the night sky, the AP reported; at least one of them was sucked into an engine.

''I was trying to go to sleep when I heard a hissing sound,'' passenger Gary M. Garber told the New York Times at the time. ''It lasted about three or four seconds and I looked at my wife next to me. All of a sudden it exploded, and I'd say three or four rows of people on the right side of the plane were blown out.''

''There were about 18 inches between me and the open air," he said.

"There was this enormous bang, the plane whacked down and down," passenger Suellyn Caudwell told the Rotorua Daily Post decades later, in 2018. "I could see the moon reflected in the water, I realized I was looking at through a gaping hole in the plane's side."

The explosion knocked down the flight's top flight attendant, Laura Brentlinger, who grabbed onto the spiral metallic staircase inside the Boeing 747-122, CBS News reported.

"I was hanging onto the rungs, and my feet were literally off the ground, hanging in mid-air," Brentlinger said. Brentlinger and the other flight attendants made it back to safety and worked quickly to protect the other passengers on the flight.

"I remember screaming to my flying partner, 'We're supposed to exude confidence,'" she told CBS News. "How do I exude confidence when I'm scared to death?"

The pilots managed to turn the plane around and make an emergency landing back at Honolulu at a much higher speed than normal, according to the FAA.

"When we began to see the lights of Honolulu I knew it would be all right, by then we were in a controlled descent," Caudwell told the Rotorua Daily Post. "I stood up and ran as fast as anyone could run and when I looked back I couldn't believe the size of the hole in the plane — you could have driven three cars through it."

As federal investigators probed the disaster, the parents of one of the passengers wanted answers. Kevin and Susan Campbell launched an investigation into the explosion, poring over photos and thousands of pages of technical documents, the Seattle Times reported.

A Boeing engineer later said in a hearing that Boeing was aware of flaws in the door's locking mechanism design years earlier, according to the Times.

Though Boeing warned airlines to reinforce their doors with extra pieces of aluminum, United didn't find any flaws with their doors and didn't make the repairs at first, the Times reported.

"Robert Doll, United's vice president of engineering, said at the hearing that United did not believe the locks were enough of a danger to justify the cost of repairing its entire fleet promptly," the Times reported.

The NTSB ultimately determined that faulty wiring and an electrical short caused the door to open — but also found that the door's mechanism design had a flaw and that Boeing, the airlines, and the Federal Aviation Administration didn't move quickly enough to fix the issue.

"There were several opportunities for the manufacturer, the airline, and the FAA, to have taken action during the service life of the Boeing 747 that would have prevented this accident," the NTSB reported.