Inspectors probe deadly Southwest jet engine explosion

National Transportation Safety Board investigators examine damage to the engine of the Southwest Airlines plane that made an emergency landing at Philadelphia

International Airport in Philadelphia on April 17. (AP) The National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday was inspecting the wrecked engine of a Southwest Airlines Co jet that blew up in mid air, killing a passenger in the first deadly US commercial airline accident in nine years.

NTSB officials retrieved the flight data recorder from the Boeing 737-700, which will be sent to Washington for review, as airlines around the world stepped up inspection of engines on that model of aircraft.

Southwest Flight 1380, which took off from New York for Dallas, Texas, with 144 passengers and five crew members aboard, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia on Tuesday after an engine on the plane ripped apart, killing bank executive Jennifer Riordan, 43.

It was the second incident involving a failure of the same sort of engine, the CFM56, made by a partnership of France’s Safran and General Electric, on a Southwest jet in the past two years.

Passengers described scenes of panic as a piece of shrapnel from the engine shattered a window on the aircraft, almost sucking a female passenger out.

“All I could think of in that moment was, I need to communicate with my loved ones,” passenger Marty Martinez told ABC’s Good Morning America on Wednesday. During the incident, he logged on to the plane’s in-flight WiFi service to send messages to his family.

Also: TERRE HAUTE, Indiana: Federal investigators say pilot error caused a small plane to crash into a home in 2016 near a western Indiana airport, fatally injuring one person and badly injuring another.

The (Terre Haute) Tribune-Star reports that the National Transportation Safety Board released a report Wednesday on the crash. The single-engine Cessna clipped the top of a 50-foot-tall (15.25-meter-tall) tree before hitting the house Aug 25, 2016, near Sky King Airport north of Terre Haute. Sixty-year-old of

was piloting the plane and died several days later, while 63-year-old survived. Both were doctors at Terre Haute Regional Hospital.

The NTSB says both men were pilots and flew the plane. O’Neill owned the plane and Trump was a potential buyer. “I thought, these are my last few moments on Earth and I want people to know what happened,” Martinez said. (Agencies)

John Trump,

Lexington, Kentucky,

Patrick O’Neill