AIR WE GO AGAIN
S’west window cracks
A Newark-bound Southwest airliner from Chicago made an emergency landing Wednesday after a window cracked in midair — just two weeks after a woman died after being partially sucked through a window that shattered after an engine blew apart on another Southwest jet.
“There was a loud pop and then the pilot came out and then checked things out; and then he announced we had to divert to Cleveland,” shaken passenger Chris Speros, 27, told The Post after arriving at Newark Liberty Airport on a replacement plane.
“It was pretty tense because he announced there was a crack in the window. We still had pressure in the cabin, but he wasn’t sure how much longer we were going to have it.”
On April 17, Jennifer Riordan died from injuries she sustained when she was nearly sucked out of a blown-out window on a Dallas-bound Southwest Boeing 737 out of La Guardia.
Riordan, 43, was a mother of two and a Wells Fargo banking executive from New Mexico.
“They didn’t want the same tragedy that happened before,” passenger Paul Upshaw said at Newark. “It made you nervous because something like this just happened a little while ago and we didn’t know if it was going to crack open or anything like that.”
Flight 957 took off from Chicago’s Midway Airport just before 8:40 a.m. and was cruising at about 26,000 feet over Lake Erie when passengers heard the window at the middle of the cabin break.
Photos posted by passengers on social media showed several large cracks running through a window.
Rich Robinson, who was heading to New Jersey to celebrate his 49th birthday, said he heard a “loud bang” coming from the exit row.
“Next thing you notice, there’s a flight attendant running toward the back and saw a couple of people run forward,” he said. “I thought somebody passed out or somebody fell or something like that.”
Upshaw, who was two seats away from the broken window, said his fellow fliers remained calm, but quickly moved away from the danger zone.
“It wasn’t a boom, but it was a crack,” he recalled.
“People just started to disperse. Probably three or four rows from there, they just started to disperse from there.”
He added, “It was going in my mind what happened before. I was hoping it wouldn’t crack any further.”
There were no injuries Tuesday, and the 76 passengers were put on another Southwest flight after landing at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport at 10:46 a.m.
They landed safely at Newark shortly after 1 p.m.
Southwest said the cabin never lost pressure — which would have prompted oxygen bags to drop down — because there are “multiple layers of panes in each window.”
Pilots also never declared an emergency before landing at Cleveland.
“The flight landed uneventfully in Cleveland,” an airline spokeswoman said.
“The aircraft has been taken out of service for maintenance review,” she added.
Southwest Airlines didn’t provide details on why the window broke.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating.