“Hold on,” Jean-Pierre shouted in English, “as hard as you can.”
Debby obeyed the request and clung to him as tightly as she could. Jean-Pierre knew by the sound that it was total chaos outside the lavatory. The sound of alarms and the noise of objects flying around the cabin filled the plane with a terrifying cacophony. The screams of women and men mingled with the roar of the engines.
“What is it? What is it?” Debby repeated.
Jean-Pierre tried to figure out what was going on. It seemed as if the plane was spinning around its axis and coming down sharply. Suddenly the plane stopped falling and Jean-Pierre and Debby were hit by inertia on the floor.
Jean-Pierre banged his hip and ribs hard, but held on with tenacity. He stood up again and took up a position with his legs and arms.
“Hold on,” Jean-Pierre commanded again.
Debby’s body went soft and her arms dangled.
The impact of incredible force threw them up to the ceiling and then threw them to the floor. Jean-Pierre hit his head and lost consciousness. He did not hear the iron screeching of the plane’s hull being torn apart. Everything around them went into total darkness and silence. Their bodies were tossed from side to side, and the door slammed shut and something propped it up on the other side. Debby and Jean-Pierre flew like wet clothes in a washing machine in the small space of a toilet cubicle at several thousand feet.
The plane stopped responding to the pilots as soon as Jean-Pierre felt the first air holes. The airliner was being pulled into the storm zone. All electronics abruptly shut down, and the plane went into a spin. The pilots tried to do something, but it was impossible to control the falling airplane. The first pilot commanded to restart the system, but when he saw the huge mountains in front of him, he realized that the plane was far away from its intended course, and the devices had been fooling them for a long time. In a final attempt to stop the plane from falling, he lifted the nose of the craft up, but caught the rock with his wing. The plane jumped up like a little boy on a sled. The impact was so powerful that the fuselage began to crack, and the wing fragments hit the tail section and cut through it like a sharp knife through paper. The tail, together with Jean-Pierre and Debby, fell off the plane and began to fall straight into the mountain range. The plane itself was without one wing and with a gaping hole behind it, descending between the peaks of the mountains.