Woman killed by exploding plane engine

AIRLINES are inspecting Boeing 737 planes after an engine on a passenger flight ripped apart mid-air and killed a woman who came close to being sucked through a broken window.

Jennifer Riordan, 43, was on a Southwest Airline flight from New York to Dallas on Tuesday when a part of the engine shattered into the window and nearly pulled her out.

Riordan, a banking executive, was hauled back by other passengers who attempted to resuscitate her, but she died later of her injuries.

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chairman Robert Sumwalt said an initial inspection of the failed engine found evidence of metal fatigue where a fan blade had broken off.

Sumwalt said investigators were very concerned about the issue of detecting slow-developing metal fatigue.

“There needs to be proper inspection mechanisms in place to check for this,” Sumwalt said.

All recent Boeing 737s are powered by engines from CFM, one of the world’s largest engine suppliers for commercial planes.

The hero pilot of the Southwest plane has been praised for her nerves of steel in carrying out an emergency landing in Philadelphia after the accident.

Tammie Jo Shults, a former fighter pilot with the US Navy, told emergency services: “We have part of the aircraft missing, so we’re going to need to slow down a bit.

“We’ve got injured passengers,” Shults said, pausing for a moment, “they said there’s a hole, and uh, someone went out.”

After touching down, the pilot walked through the aisle to meet her passengers.

“She has nerves of steel that lady, I applaud her,” one of them, Alfred Tumlinson, said.

In 2016, another Southwest flight was forced to make an emergency landing after a fan blade separated from the same type of engine, and debris ripped a 30cm-long hole above the left wing.

Metal fatigue was cited in that incident too. CFM said yesterday that there are more than 8 000 of its CFM56-7B engines – the model involved in Tuesday’s incident – in operation on Boeing 737 passenger jets.

Southwest, which operates one of the largest 737 fleets and has a strong safety record, said it was speeding up inspections of all related engines, which it expected to complete within 30 days.

The incident on Tuesday, the first fatal US airline accident in almost a decade, left seven others injured on the 144-passenger plane. – The Telegraph