A Nebraska father and his two sons on a trip to Los Angeles for a Pokémon Go tournament nearly met a harrowing end on Friday’s cursed Frontier flight, which saw a man shredded in their plane’s engine.
56-year-old John Anthens thought he and his two sons, 30-year-old Jacob and 19-year-old Levi, were going to die in the seconds following the plane’s engine sucking an unidentified pedestrian in.
“When the engine blew up, I thought, ‘oh sh*t, we’re all going to die,” John Anthens said.
Anthens said he felt the nose of the plane pitch up before what sounded like a “bomb” rocked the cabin.
Jacob said his father was looking out the window when it happened and witnessed a gruesome sight.
“My dad said when the engine fire went up, he was able to see the legs of a human spinning around in the engine…which sounds like emotional trauma to me,” Jacob said.
The plane managed to put the nose down and come to a stop. The father and two sons say they sat in their seats choking in thick black smoke from the fire, and flight attendants commanded people to stay in their seats.
“I would say the majority of people didn’t know what was going on or what happened, but there was just a big explosion, and obviously, you hear a big explosion, people start screaming, kids are crying, and it was horrific,” John said.
The three made it off the plane okay, with John pausing to take photos of the bloody aftermath in the engine and his younger son, Levi, helping people slide off the plane.
None of them got much sleep that night, and they decided to cancel their first-ever trip to California over the trauma the flight inflicted. Frontier offered John a $500 flight credit he says won’t be of much use because of the harrowing experience.
It also ruined their father-son Pokémon experience set to go at the Pokémon Regional Championships.
Anthens said he was traveling to Los Angeles to play in a Pokémon Go tournament with Jacob at the LA Convention Center.
Jacob is a highly-ranked player in Pokémon Go, the infamous pocket-monster walking game, and hoped to advance far in the tournament.
“I thought I had a real chance to make some noise there,” he said.
“We were going to go have some fun, and never got that opportunity,” John added.
The family is making the 8-hour drive back to Omaha, Nebraska, in a rental car — opting out of another flight.
But one Pokémon extravaganza short and heavy from the trauma of the bizarre plane experience, the family wants to be optimistic.
John said they’re going whitewater rafting, hours after they could have died.
“[Need to] get our mind on something other than somebody blowing up in an engine.”
