Matthew McConaughey says he was 'in shock' on Lufthansa flight that injured 7 people: 'Hell of a scare'
Matthew McConaughey opened up about being on that Lufthansa flight last month, calling the incident "a hell of a scare." The Oscar-winning actor and his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, were flying from Austin, Texas, to Frankfurt, Germany when the aircraft experienced unexpected severe turbulence and dropped 4,000 feet. Seven people were hospitalized.
"It's suspended disbelief. I mean, it's zero gravity," Matthew says on SiriusXM's Let's Talk Off Camera podcast with Kelly Ripa, according to a sneak peek obtained by Entertainment Tonight. "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."
The Texas native explains how he felt like 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 recalls. Matthew says he "immediately" checked on Camila to ensure she was buckled in.
"[We] held hands just saying, 'OK, is that it? Is there another one coming?' Another one did come," he adds. "It was odd. You hear people's reactions. Some people were ghost silent. Some people had big bursts of laughter. And it was not like, 'Oh, this is fun.' It was like, 'I'm in shock.'"
The McConaugheys were traveling with a friend, who happened to be a pilot, and he helped calm them down by saying the Airbus A330 planes are "tested" and structurally "built" to handle such incidents.
Camila first revealed she and her husband were on board the March 1 flight that ended up getting diverted to a Washington, D.C., area airport. She shared a video of the turbulence inside the cabin. Food, napkins and plates were all over the floor.
"I was told [the] plane dropped almost 4,000 feet," Camila wrote on Instagram. "Everything was flying everywhere... the plane was CHAOS — and the turbulence [kept] on coming."
