I’d at first read the plane was without passengers and just being flown somewhere… and I thought, great. Today I read that it was full of passengers, and the two people supposed to be in the two seats in the row the panel blew out happened to miss their flight. If that’s true… what an interesting set of statistics coming together. Amount of people that sleep through flights Amount of panels that blow out of passenger…
We are seeing the "inverted Swiss cheese" model of disaster avoidance: you are only safe if several independent, random events go your way.
It sounds like if they were on board and wearing seat belts they would have been fine. Possibly very shaken, but fine.