One passenger is dead after a Southwest Airlines jet’s engine failed in mid-flight, with some parts penetrating the passenger compartment and forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia.
One passenger was partially sucked from the plane when shrapnel pierced a window, and it’s unclear whether she’s the person who died. Flight 1380, which was carrying 144 passengers and five crew members, was traveling from LaGuardia Airport in New York City to Love Field in Dallas, said National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt.
The agency is sending a team to Philadelphia to investigate, he said in a briefing broadcast by Channel 6 KOTV of Tulsa, Okla. Flight recorders from the aircraft, a single-aisle Boeing 737-700, have been secured and will be returned to Washington, D.C., this evening for examination. The engine was built by a CFM International, a partnership of General Electric and Safran SA of France.
“The engine will be ultimately shipped offsite, where we can do a detailed examination and teardown,” Sumwalt said. It’s too soon to tell whether there are any commonalities with the CFM engine failure on Southwest Flight 3472, which made an emergency landing in Pensacola, Fla., two years ago.
Part of the left engine of that plane, also a Boeing 737-800, and a fan blade separated during flight, the NTSB found, but the passenger compartment wasn’t penetrated.
Fox 29 reported a total of 10 people were injured on Tuesday, including the woman whose window was destroyed; she had been listed in critical condition with head trauma.
Technical teams from Both Boeing and CFM will travel to Philadelphia to assist investigators examining the aircraft which has been in service since August 2000, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.
Commercial airplanes began using the engine model, a CFM 56-7B, in 1997, said Jamie Jewell, a company spokeswoman, and it has since been installed on more than 6,000 airplanes and logged more than 350 million flight hours. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment further.
