Video shows evacuation slide falling from United Airlines plane onto neighborhood near O'Hare
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Video obtained Tuesday shows a United Airlines jet flying near O'Hare International Airport and dropping an emergency slide over a Far Northwest Side neighborhood the day before.
A home surveillance video camera captured the falling chute.
The chute hit the of a house in the 4700 block of North Chester Avenue – near Lawrence and Cumberland avenues - in the O'Hare community just east of the airport. Patrick Devitt lives in the house, and talked with CBS 2 Political Investigator Dana Kozlov on Monday.
"So it hit right there on the downspout and came straight down," Devitt said. "Landed right here in the garden, smashed all these plants – stuff like that."
It was a United Airlines emergency slide, which officials said fell off a 767-200 as it was flying into O'Hare from Switzerland.
Devitt's house is under a flight path, right near O'Hare. But he said this incident is a first.
"A couple of inches, you know, further to the east, and it would have landed right on the house," Devitt said. "So we're very lucky."
A total of 155 people and 10 crewmembers were on the plane from Zürich. The crewmembers didn't notice the emergency slide was missing until they landed - minutes after it landed in the neighborhood just to the east.
There was still no word late Tuesday on how the slide fell from the plane. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating.
