The Alaska door plug incident didn’t have casualties only because it just so happened nobody was sitting in the two seats directly adjacent to the door plug.
Edit: the point isn’t to dispute whether somebody would have died or not, but to not let a stroke of luck downplay the severity of the actual issue
We are not talking fatalities, we are talking casualties. You cannot convince me that an explosive decompression at 16k feet won’t cause serious injury at the least.
Edit: seat belts are designed against the forces of severe turbulence, not explosive decompressions. Assuming the seat belt actually holds, all the forces are applied against the single point of contact the belt has with the midsection of the passenger. Reminder that the forces were enough to torque two seats, rip the padding off the closest seat, and ripped the shirt off a nearby passenger. I actually think there is a decent chance there would’ve been a fatality should anybody have sat in the closest seat.
Zero Jet Aircraft Crashes: 2023 Was One Of Aviation’s Safest Years On Record (simpleflying.com)