TWA Flight 840, a Boeing 727 flying from Rome to Athens with 115 passengers and seven crew members aboard, had already begun its descent toward the Athens international airport. Twenty minutes before the plane's expected landing, as it flew at 15,000 ft. over Argos, a town near the ancient site of Mycenae, an explosion shook the aircraft. At first the pilot, Captain Richard Peterson, 56, a 30-year veteran, thought the problem was a broken window, though he later likened the thunderous sound to that of "a shotgun going off next to your ear." Said Passenger Jane Klingel, 25, from California: "The plane shook, as it would in turbulence. In front of me, I saw a sort of green lightning. I thought I was dying."
Neither the crew nor most of the passengers knew at the time that four of the passengers had been sucked out of the 9-ft. by 4-ft. hole blown in the fuselage near the right wing in the moments after the explosion. On the ground, a shepherd near Argos found the bodies of three Greek Americans, all from Annapolis, Md.: Demetra Stylianopoulou, 58, her daughter Maria Klug, 25, and her eight-month-old granddaughter Demetra. A fourth body, that of Colombian-born Alberto Ospino, 39, of Stratford, Conn., was later found in a nearby field, along with the window seat in which he had been sitting, 10-F.
Aboard the plane, Saudi Arabian Passenger Ibrahim al Nami, 29, thought he saw Ospino go through the hole. Said al Nami: "I was talking with my wife when we heard the explosion. Suddenly my chair sank. The man sitting next to me at the window, I don't know what happened to him. He disappeared. My foot went through the cabin floor. I caught hold of my wife's seat and held on hard."
As debris and fiberglass particles filled the cabin, blown about by the intrusive wind, terror gripped the passengers. Pushing away from the gaping hole, a few grabbed their hand baggage and irrationally told flight attendants they wanted to leave the plane. Stewardess Catherine Erickson, 30, scooped up some linen napkins and handed them out to passengers whose legs and feet were bleeding.
When some oxygen masks remained jammed in the overhead compartments, a passenger used a pocket knife to pry them loose. Tom Kojis, 44, a Methodist pastor from Algoma, Wis., comforted his twelve-year-old son Jonathan, telling him, "We're not going to die. We still have things to do." Nancy Hauser, 37, of Los Angeles said later, "My feeling was we weren't going to make it. I saw this huge hole, and we were losing elevation fast."
In the cockpit, Peterson immediately turned his plane 20 degrees to the left and started a direct descent toward the Athens airport. He told the tower, "I have a problem with one of the windows. I think it is going to break, and I request immediate priority for landing." Then he tried to calm the passengers. "Please don't panic. Our engines are O.K. We'll be landing in about ten minutes if nothing else goes wrong."