Chaos gripped Southwest flight as engine burst
Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 appeared destined for an unremarkable trip to Dallas as it lumbered down the runway Tuesday at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, a Boeing 737 with 148 people aboard.
Less than half an hour later, chaos and fear were sweeping through the cabin. An engine had blown apart, showering the fuselage with shrapnel and shattering a window. A woman would die a horrific death, but 147 other people would emerge virtually unscathed.
Some were not even aware of how serious the incident was. William Madison, 56, was sitting near the back of the plane. Unable to sleep, he had begun reading when he felt a bump.
“We heard a muffled bang, then we shook,” Madison said the next day, safely home in New York after deciding to skip the Texas trip. The plane began a rapid descent, but quickly began to stabilize. When the oxygen masks fell, “the people on either side of me said ‘I guess we better use these.’ So we put them on.”
Closer to the front of the plane, the dire circumstances were much more apparent.
“The plane rattled and shook and people were screaming, crying,” said passenger Julian Lujan, 22, who was returning to Texas from his first trip to New York. “The pressure in the plane began to drop and people were panicking.”
Lujan said he saw debris from the engine scraping the plane. Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said one of the 24 fan blades that push air into the left engine broke off and was missing. There was evidence of metal fatigue, he said.
The investigation into the cause of the failure is continuing. Wednesday night, U.S. airline regulators said they will order inspections on engine fan blades like the ones on the Southwest flight, The Associated Press reported.
Southwest CEO Gary Kelly was astonished at the damage, including a smashed window near the engine.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time we have lost a window,” Kelly said.
Physics took over. The air pressure inside the plane was markedly higher than outside the cabin. Air rushed out the window. The pressure was so great it sucked passenger Jennifer Riordan, a Wells Fargo banking executive, halfway out of the plane, witnesses said. Riordan would not survive. As the tragic drama unfolded in the cabin, more heroism was on display in the cockpit. Pilot Tammie Jo Shults, whose resume includes recognition as one of the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. military, brought the plane in for a landing.
Then she walked the aisles to check on each passenger personally, according to WPVI-TV.