“It’s a suspension of disbelief. I mean, it’s zero gravity,” the actor said, recalling the intense turbulence aboard a Lufthansa aircraft he took earlier this month.
Matthew McConaughey is reflecting on his recent trip aboard a Lufthansa flight that experienced extreme turbulence.
The Academy Award winner, 53, was flying with his wife, Camila Alves, from Austin, Texas, to Frankfurt, Germany, when the plane had to make an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
“It’s a suspension of disbelief. I mean, it’s zero gravity,” McConaughey remarked in a teaser clip of his upcoming appearance on the Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast.
Alves, 41, had previously posted her memories of the flight on Instagram, stating that “the plane dropped almost 4000 feet.”
McConaughey explained that as the plane touched down, he “immediately reached over, made sure Camila had her seatbelt on.”
“My tray table held me down,” he told podcast host Kelly Ripa. “I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt, and there was no warning right before it happened,” he explained, calling the event a “hell of a scare.”
“Your red wine, glass, and plates with your food are all suspended, floating, just in the air. And to look at that for that long — one, two, three, four [seconds] — and then everything comes tumbling down,” he went on.
During the scary event, the Dallas Buyers Club star stated that he received consolation from his pilot friend sitting alongside him.
“I happened to be sitting next to a pilot friend. And he was as cool as a cucumber,” McConaughey remarked. “I asked myself, ‘Can the plane hold that?’” ‘These things are so tested that yes, don’t worry, the plane structurally can hold that,’ he said. That gave me a lot of relief.”
According to the FAA, Lufthansa Flight 469 was flying 37,000 feet above Tennessee when it encountered “severe turbulence” that hospitalized seven passengers. According to the FAA, the plane landed at the Virginia airport “without incident” at about 9:10 p.m.
