Matthew McConaughey is sharing details of his terrifying experience onboard the Lufthansa flight that made headlines last month after it unexpectedly dropped 4,000 feet.
McConaughey and his wife, Camila Alves, were traveling on the plane from Austin, Texas, to Frankfurt, Germany, but were forced to land in Virginia after severe turbulence sent the plane into a brief free fall, injuring seven, according to the Daily Mail.
"It's suspended disbelief," McConaughey explained in a sneak peek of the latest episode of SiriusXM's "Let's Talk Off Camera" podcast with Kelly Ripa, which was made available by Entertainment Tonight. "I mean, it's zero gravity. Your red wine and the glass and the plates that your food was on are all suspended, floating, still just in the air. And to look at it for that long, which wasn't that long — one, two, three, four [seconds] — and then everything just comes crashing down."
McConaughey described the experience as "a hell of a scare," noting he felt as if he had "no way to get control of this situation, the moment."
"My tray table is what held me down. I did not have my seatbelt on, and there was not a seatbelt warning right before it happened," he recalled, adding that he "immediately reached over, made sure Camila had her seatbelt on."
McConaughey, who along with Alves was traveling with a pilot friend, said his mind went to the engineering of the plane.
"The steel, it buckled," he said. "And you go, 'How can something withstand that?' I happened to have a friend of mine sitting next to me who was a pilot. And he was calm as could be. I was like, 'Can the plane hold that?' And he was like, 'These things are so tested, that yes, don't worry, the plane structurally can hold that.' That was a big relief."
But while his pilot friend was calm, the flight attendants did not share his confidence.
"If you see the flight attendant not looking extremely confident, you're like, Uh-oh," he said. "It was the hairiest flight I've ever had by far."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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