Hearing opens on Southwest engine failure
Investigators seek cause of accident that killed ABQ woman
PHILADELPHIA — A passenger on Southwest Flight 1380 described the sudden noise when the engine blew as like “a marble hitting glass.” Then, a roar as the plane depressurized. Flight attendants trying to ensure passengers were receiving air through emergency masks that dropped from the ceiling recalled the noise, coupled with the sudden pressure drop’s effect on their ears, leaving them nearly deafened.
“Because of the pressure in her ears, she could barely hear anything,” according to documents federal safety officials released Wednesday, describing the experience of flight attendant Rachel Fernheimer that morning over Pennsylvania, April 17, 2018. “The cabin was loud and windy.”
Fernheimer tried to remember her training and walked along the aisle, holding hands, telling passengers they would be OK, saying the plane would land. She couldn’t know that, though. Over the noise, she couldn’t hear anything from the flight crew. She checked on passengers’ oxygen masks, some of which had air hoses that had come loose. She reconnected
those tubes to the oxygen supply, and showed other passengers how to wear the masks properly.
When she reached Row 14 of the two-engine jet, a horrifying sight greeted her. The upper body of the passenger in Seat 14A had been sucked through the broken window.
As flight attendants Seanique Mallory and Fernheimer struggled to keep Jennifer Riordan, 43, inside the plane, a passenger reached out the window and pulled her back into the plane. Injuries to Riordan, a well-known Albuquerque businesswoman and mother of two, would prove fatal.
New details about the Boeing 737-700 that lost an engine about 50 miles from Philadelphia emerged from a trove of documents released by the National Transportation Safety Board before a 9 a.m. hearing Wednesday in Washington.
The jet carried 144 passengers and five crew. Its left engine blew after a fan blade broke while spinning at 5,149 rotations per minute and shredded the engine and its casing. Pilot Tammie Jo Shults — one of the first female fighter pilots in the Navy — was able to land the aircraft, which had taken off from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport and was headed to Love Field in Dallas, about 20 minutes later at Philadelphia International Airport, with all those on board except Riordan surviving with minimal injuries.
During the first half of the NTSB hearing Wednesday morning, questions focused on the testing that titanium fan blades undergo and the engine casing’s ability to contain a catastrophic event. The NTSB documents note that, for pieces of the inlet, which directs air into the engine, and cowling to break free due to the fan blade failure was unexpected, as was the damage to the window. The safety agency took testimony from officials from Southwest, Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration, and CFM International, the engine’s manufacturer. Southwest officials stated during the hearing that the CFM56-7 engine on Flight 1380 did not need to undergo intensive testing under the standards at the time of the incident.
Fan blades experience enormous strain during a flight, drawing thousands of pounds of air into the engine. The amount of use a fan blade can have without inspection has been halved since the Philadelphia incident, but during Wednesday’s hearing, Bella Dinh-Zarr, a member of the NTSB board, asked whether fan blades should have a mandated age at which they are pulled from use.
It was something that officials were looking into, said Christopher Spinney, who testified for the FAA. Eight blades have been pulled from service due to the discovery of cracks since the Philadelphia incident, the NTSB reported at the hearing.
Also under investigation is why the inlet and the cowl that surrounds the engine didn’t contain the damaged engine, and didn’t prevent debris from spraying forward into the fuselage. A virtually identical fan-blade failure occurred on another Southwest flight, over Pensacola, Fla., in 2016, but no one was injured. Investigators are looking at whether the angle of impact of the fan blade on the casing was the reason the Philadelphia incident turned deadly, and whether further testing and precautions are needed to secure the parts surrounding an engine.
In a statement Wednesday, CFM International noted that it had moved aggressively to address the concerns raised by the accident.
“All of the CFM56-7B fan blades targeted by the various Airworthiness Directives were cleared by mid-August 2018, ahead of the August 31 deadline,” the company said.
CFM International is a cooperative between the French company Safran Aircraft Engines and General Electric.
Pieces of the plane rained down on Berks County, some of them small fragments of metal, others large sheets torn from the ruined engine. All the recovered parts landed in Bernville, a community of about 1,000 people.