Horror & heroism at 32,000 feet
Fellow passengers on Wednesday relived their horror at seeing a woman dangling through a window that had been blown out at 32,000 feet by the shrapnel from a ruptured engine on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380.
Only a buckled seat belt kept Jennifer Riordan’s whole body from being pulled into the subzero, oxygen-thin abyss, as other fliers ran to her aid.
“Her seat belt was keeping her held down at the hips,” Peggy Phillips, a retired school nurse on her way home to Dallas, told The Post. “The rest of her was outside the plane.” Two Texans — Stetson-wearing real-estate worker Tim McGinty and firefighter Andrew Needum — had rushed to Row 14 to help Riordan, a 43-year-old Wells Fargo executive from Albuquerque, NM.
“When we saw the window was gone, somebody saw the lady out of the window, so [I] just tried to get her back in and [I] wasn’t strong enough,” McGinty told NBC.
“A fireman, from Celina, Texas, jumped in there and helped and between the two of us, we were able to get her back in.”
Phillips ran back to assist the two strangers.
“I took my mask off, I took my seat belt off, and I went back,” she said.
By the time Phillips had fought through the chaos, Needum had laid the bloodied Riordan across a row of seats, and was giving her chest compressions.
The 22 minutes between the catastrophic engine failure and the jet’s safe touchdown at Philadelphia International Airport almost didn’t seem to matter as Phillips and Needum fought to keep Riordan with them, taking turns performing CPR.
“That was the only thing I focused on,” Phillips said. “Everything else just faded into the background.”
Despite their efforts, “it wasn’t a happy ending.”
Riordan — a mother of two — died from her wounds, while seven others were treated for minor injuries.
A coroner’s report released Wednesday said that her cause of death was blunt-impact trauma to the head, neck and torso.
The engine explosion happened about 20 minutes into the flight out of La Guardia Airport.
A fan blade suddenly snapped, causing a deafening explosion and sending a shower of shrapnel into the fuselage.
“I was getting ready to take a nap,” said Phillips, 68. “That didn’t work out.” The blast knocked a flight attendant to the aisle floor as it violently rocked the cabin.
“The plane just started shaking and it was the most awful racket you ever heard in your life,” Phillips said.
“I lost all my hearing in both ears until about two hours after I landed.”
As gale-force winds sent plumes of ash into the cabin, Phillips secured her oxygen mask and helped those around her do the same.
She then pulled out her cellphone to text her daughter goodbye. The time was 11:11 a.m. Tuesday. “I just wrote, ‘Plane troubles, love you,’ ” Phillips said. “I wasn’t sure that I would ever have an opportunity to send another text. At least if they found my phone, they would see my message.”
“I truly didn’t think that I was going to get off the plane alive.”
Phillips said she was devastated by Riordan’s death.
“My heart aches for her family,” Phillips said. “I hope that they realize we did everything we could possibly do under the circumstances to save her life.”
Riordan, who did community and publicrelations work for Wells Fargo, was on her way home from a business trip to the Big Apple, where she had tweeted a picture from her room at the Double Tree by Hilton Metropolitan.
“Great business stay,” she added in a caption late Monday.
In a statement, her family members described her as “the bedrock” of the clan.
“Jennifer’s vibrancy, passion and love infused our community and reached across our country. Her impact on everything and everyone she touched can never be fully measured,” read the statement about the mother of two.
Phillips said it was only because of the skilled pilots that Riordan was the only fatality.
“The pilot and the co-pilot [were] rock stars,” she said. “Everyone performed beautifully in their assigned role.”
By late Tuesday, Phillips had boarded another Southwest flight and arrived back home in Texas.
“I trusted them to get me home to Dallas safely,” she said. “And they did.”