Honolulu resident Janis Akuna, who was sitting in the third row of a Southwest Airlines flight, was unaware when a top section of the Boeing 737 ripped open about 20 minutes into the flight.

“We just all heard this pop and a whoosh, then oxygen masks came down and we put those on,” said the 60-year-old outgoing Board of Education member and wealth adviser for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.

“We were watching when one of the attendants, who couldn’t get his oxygen mask on, passed out and fell down and was bleeding,” she said. “We were more freaked out about that than anything else.”

Another flight attendant helped him with his oxygen mask and kept everyone calm, she said.

“Everybody was calm,” she said. “People just put on the masks.”

Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokes­man in Los Angeles, said the pilot “made a rapid, controlled descent from 36,000 feet to 11,000 feet altitude after the incident occurred.”

Flight 812 had left Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport for Sacramento, Calif., yesterday when a ceiling panel above the Boeing 737 plane’s middle aisle was hanging open.

Officials with Dallas-based Southwest said there were no injuries among the 118 people aboard. Another passenger said some people were passing out because they were not getting oxygen.

Once the pilot quickly brought the plane down to the lower altitude, passengers were able to remove their oxygen masks, she said.

“We kept wondering what caused this,” Akuna said. “We just knew we lost our pressure. … The engine was fine, and the plane was going to land — no problem.”

She looked behind her and saw a 4-by-2-foot panel had fallen to the floor and a hole in the ceiling with the sky outside visible.

“I went back and took a picture,” she said. “There was a hole going outside.”

She thought, “Wow, we’ve been flying around with that thing?”

The passenger sitting under the hole seemed fine. “He said, ‘No, I’m fine.’ He just couldn’t hear for a while,” she said.

“Fortunately, it was up at the ceiling,” said Akuna, who recalled the fate of an Aloha Airlines flight attendant in 1988 who was sucked through a gaping 20-foot hole when the upper fuselage of a Boeing 737 ripped off, injuring 61 passengers.

“When we landed, everyone clapped,” she said. “The pilots came out and everybody clapped some more. It was a smooth landing, but there was just the hole in the ceiling.”

The plane landed safely to the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station/International Airport, some 150 miles southwest of Phoenix and about 40 minutes after takeoff.

Gregor said an FAA inspector from Phoenix was en route to Yuma.

The National Transportation Safety Board said a Go Team is scheduled to depart this morning to investigate the fuselage rupture of the aircraft.

Akuna, who had attended a Morgan Stanley Smith Barney conference in Phoenix, was headed for Sacramento to catch a connecting flight home.

She hopes to arrive safely in Hono­lulu today in time to attend her last Board of Education meeting Thursday.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.