Deadly Emergency
Airplane makes emergency landing at Philadelphia airport
■ The engine on a Southwest Airlines plane is inspected as it sits on the runway Tuesday at the Philadelphia International Airport after it made an emergency landing in Philadelphia. One person died and a woman was nearly sucked out of a window when an engine blew.
PHILADELPHIA— One passenger died and seven others were injured Tuesday morning when a Southwest Airlines plane flying from New York to Dallas apparently blew an engine in midair, sending smoke into the cabin and forcing an emergency landing in Philadelphia.
The flight was carrying five crew members and 144 passengers, some of whom described hearing a loud boom mid-flight before a window blew out, and the smoke-filled plane suddenly felt as if it dropped in the air.
“Everybody knew something’s going on—‘This is bad, like really bad,’” passenger Timothy Bourman, a 37-year-old pastor from Queens, N.Y., said in a phone interview from the terminal as emergency personnel surrounded the plane on a runway at Philadelphia International Airport. “A lot of people started panicking and yelling, just real scared.”
Pilots ultimately managed to guide the plane to a safe landing. But one injured passenger, identified as Jennifer Riordan of Albuquerque, N.M., was rushed to an area hospital, where she died Tuesday afternoon. Riordan had worked as vice president of community relations at a Wells Fargo in New Mexico.
Officials did not explain how she died. They said other passengers were treated for minor injuries.
The incident—the first airline accident to result in a fatality since 2009— quickly made national headlines as news cameras aired live footage of the grounded plane, its mangled engine appearing to be burst open. Passengers shared images and videos on social media from inside the cabin, sparking widespread interest while official details were scarce.
The Southwest plane is a Boeing 737-7H4 that began flying in 2000 and is certified through 2021, according to FAA records. A review of repair data on the plane showed no previous significant engine problems, but a similar Southwest jet endured a comparable engine failure two years ago.
Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Review Board, headed Tuesday night to Philadelphia, where he planned his second briefing of the day. Earlier, he told reporters in Washington that agency investigators would assess damage and obtain flight data recorders in an effort to piece together what went wrong.
Officials said the engine of the plane malfunctioned around 11:15 a.m. on its way from New York LaGuardia to Dallas Love Field. It landed in Philadelphia at about 11:20 a.m. after crew members “reported damage to one of the aircraft’s engines, as well as the fuselage and at least one window,” according to the FAA.
Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel said when the aircraft reached the ground, there was a fuel leak and a small fire in the engine. The incident was placed under control at 12:32 p.m.
In a video message posted Tuesday evening, Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly said Riordan’s family is the company’s “immediate and primary concern.” He also said Southwest—which has 706 planes and flies about 4,000 flights a day—is “in the earliest stages of gathering information.”
Less than two years ago, another Southwest plane experienced an uncontained engine failure that bore similarities to Tuesday’s. On Aug. 27, 2016, a Southwest 737 flying from New Orleans to Orlando, Fla. had to be diverted because an engine failure. Like in Tuesday’s incident, debris from the damaged engine was blown forward and damaged the fuselage. Nothing broke through into the passenger compartment, according to the NTSB’s initial report on the incident, and no one was injured, though the cabin lost pressure.
The plane involved in that incident, which remains under investigation by the NTSB, was a Boeing 737-700 and had a CFM56 series engine, the same as the plane that landed Tuesday in Philadelphia. Investigators found a fan blade had broken loose in the left engine, and there was evidence of a fatigue crack at the root of the blade, the NTSB reported.
The NTSB chairman said he was aware of the 2016 incident, but didn’t know if the incident in Philadelphia was caused by a similar problem.
“We want to look at this particular event and see what the factors are surrounding this and maybe they’re related to that previous event and maybe they’re not,” he said during the Washington briefing Tuesday.
A review of FAA data on engine repairs on Southwest flights from 2010 to 2017 found 27 incidents, two of which related to problems with fan blades, but neither appear to have resulted in any injuries.
Despite the engine failure Tuesday, Kathy Farnan, 77, of Santa Fe, N.M., a passenger on board said, “it was a beautiful landing.” She added crew members “were fast on their feet” and kept passengers calm as the plane descended.
Passenger Matt Tranchin, 34, of Dallas, told reporters that flight attendants and some passengers worked to cover the hole that blew through the plane.
Once the aircraft dropped and the oxygen masks fell, Tranchin spent what felt like the next half hour thinking he wasn’t “going to make it” and texting his wife, who is pregnant with their first child.
“I spent a lot of my time trying to articulate what my final words would be,” he said, “to our unborn child, to my wife, to my parents.”
He told them goodbye, and that he loved them.