Engine explosion in mid-air kills one and injures seven

Jennifer Riordan, a mother-of-two and Well Fargo bank vice-president at Albuquerque, New Mexico, was partially sucked out of a window of a US passenger plane South West Airline Flight 1380 after a CFM56 engine exploded in mid-air had died.

The Boeing 737-700 airline has been en route to New York’s La Guardia airport to Dallas, Texas, with 143 passengers and five crew,  made an emergency landing in Philadelphia after a window, wings and fuselage were damaged, as seven more passengers were injured. An engine fan blade was flying off and missing and hit the glass window which exploded on impact in mid-air. In a recording, Tammie Jo Shults, one of the pilots can be heard saying “ there is a hole and someone went out”. Asked if the plane is on fire, she says it is not. The last passenger death on a US commercial flight was in 2009. Although she was pulled back after being nearly sucked out, succumbed to injuries.

The National Transportation Safety Board ( NTSB)  chairman Robert Sumwalt said a primary investigation revealed that an engine’s covering part of the cowling- fan blade was missing and there was evidence of metal fatigue at the point where it had apparently broken off, was later recovered in  Bernville, Pennsylvania about 70 miles (112km) from Philadelphia. According to one of the passengers “ First there was an explosion and them almost immediately the oxygen masks came down and probably within a matter of 10 seconds the engine hit a window and busted it open. All the sudden, it felt like we dropped 100 feet after the free-fall. It seemed like the pilot was having a hard time controlling the plane.  Honestly, I think we all thought we were going down fast. There was blood everywhere.”

First responders “found a fuel leak and a small fire in one of the engines”.