Passenger injured after being partially sucked out of plane after takeoff

THESSALONIKI, Greece -- A passenger on board a Ryanair flight from Greece to Germany was being treated in a hospital Friday after being partially sucked out of a window that broke shortly after takeoff.

A Greek hospital official said the 61-year-old passenger was treated for neck and shoulder injuries and friction burns. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly to the media.

The Friday morning flight from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki to Memmingen near Munich was operated by Ryanair subsidiary Malta Air. Ryanair said the flight "returned to Thessaloniki shortly after takeoff when a passenger window dislodged in-flight."

A doctor says his wife held onto her husband's feet for several minutes to keep him partially in the plane, ABC News reported. He is is now in the ICU in Greece receiving treatment.

A senior Greek aviation official tells ABC News the incident started with an engine failure, adding pieces of the engine hit the plane's fuselage, shattering the window.

The airline has not addressed what caused the issue but said in a statement that the plane landed normally and passengers returned to the terminal, and one passenger requested and received medical assistance on the ground in Thessaloniki. A replacement aircraft was later provided to fly the passengers to Germany.

Passengers told Greek media that they heard a loud bang, oxygen masks dropped and the plane began to lose altitude.

One passenger, identified only as Christina, told Thessaloniki radio that passengers panicked and screamed and that one passenger was partially sucked out of the window.

"His whole head, neck, shoulders" were pulled out of the window, she said, adding that those seated near him pulled him back in.

"Most people had fallen asleep, we had closed our eyes. We heard a sound, I'd describe it like a tire bursting, ... but very loud," she said. "We knew straight away we lost pressure because we lost altitude. ... Screams, shrieks, shouting."

Among the questions officials say they're working to clarify is whether the passenger was wearing his seatbelt when the window shattered.

The aircraft was a Boeing 737-800, which can seat up to 189 passengers. The narrow-body plane was delivered new to Ryanair in 2008, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24.

About six minutes after departure, flight records show, the aircraft climbed past 15,000 feet (4,570 meters), then immediately descended to about 6,000 feet (1,830 meters) "to burn fuel for 30 minutes" before returning to Thessaloniki about an hour after takeoff, Flightradar24 said.

It's a rare but similar incident to what happened aboard a Southwest flight eight years ago that had to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

That flight was heading from New York's LaGuardia Airport to Dallas when part of the Boeing plane's engine exploded due to fatigue, according to the NTSB report, shattering a window and killing the passenger who was sucked out.

The FAA immediately ordered inspections of similar aircraft, and the NTSB's findings led Boeing to redesign parts of its engine panels.

ABC News contributed to this post.