Last week, Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 operated by Boeing B737-700 aircraft suffered engine failure, which led to eventual death of one passenger.

One of the two engines of the aircraft was damaged airborne, while traveling from New York to Dallas with 144 passengers and five crew onboard.

The pilot of the flight declared emergency landing and took the airplane to rapid descent and landed successfully in Philadelphia.

 According to CNN, as passengers prayed and pondered their last words to loved ones, the pilot in command of the flight, Captain Tammie Jo Shults and First Officer Darren Ellisor had the duty of landing the big injured aircraft safely.

One of the passengers, Jennifer Riordan who was almost sucked out of the airplane after she was fatally injured was pulled back by passengers into the plane but she died in the hospital after the aircraft landed safely. It was the first fatal accident involving a US-based passenger airline since 2009, NTSB said.

After the accident, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) started investigation into the aircraft engine. According to reports, in preliminary briefings, NTSB Chairman, Robert Sumwalt said that inspection of the damaged engine revealed that one of the titanium blades on the big fan had broken off at the root, and that there was evidence of metal fatigue at the site where it broke. He said metal fatigue is a major problem.

Investigations also suggested that the engine, which was built by CPM, might have had that challenge because “the shrapnel damage to the plane’s fuselage and photos of the damage suggest this was a dangerous “uncontained engine failure.” Such incidents occur about three or four times a year worldwide, according to the NTSB.

After the accident, signals were sent all over the world for the inspection of the engine type, which is CFM 56-7B, which is fitted in most of Boeing B737-700 New Generation aircraft series.

On Monday, FAA and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued emergency airworthiness directives requiring operators to inspect fan blades on older CFM56-7B engines within 20 days, airwise.com reported.

The directives applied to CFM International engines of the type that was fitted to the Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-700.

 Initial NTSB inspections of the Southwest engine showed a fan blade had detached and there was evidence of metal fatigue in the fractured blade.

Engines with over 30,000 total cycles must complete the inspections within 20 days, the FAA said. The CFM engines subject to the emergency directives number 681 worldwide and 352 in the US.

 In Nigeria, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) received FAA directive to review the aircraft the same type of aircraft engines fitted on aircraft being operated in Nigeria.

The Director General of NCAA, Captain Muhtar Usman told THISDAY that the agency was reviewing the aircraft being operated by Nigerian airlines to identify those that may have the engine type.

THISDAY investigations disclosed that Arik Air is the only airline that has Boeing B737-700 and has seven of the aircraft type in its fleet. But inside sources revealed that the engines are relatively newer than the ones being investigated and they neither were near 20 years old nor recorded 30,000 total cycles.

Captain Usman said after the review, if any aircraft engine was affected the NCAA would take appropriate action, dismissing insinuations that some of the aircraft in Air Peace fleet may also have such engine types.

 Spokesman of Air Peace, Chris Iwarah said the airline has Boeing 737-300 and 737-500 aircraft, “which had been credited with perfect engine performance”, in its fleet.

The B737-300 and B737-500 aircraft are fitted with a CFM56-3C engine,” he said.

 The airline said besides contracting one of the best aircraft maintenance companies in the world, BCT Aviation, to do routine maintenance of its fleet on ground its base in Lagos, it was spending huge foreign exchange to maintain its aircraft in some of the best facilities in the world to ensure that the safety of the flying public was not compromised.

“The FAA directive to airlines which operate aircraft with the same engine with the US carrier to perform ultrasonic inspection on the engines installed on NG B737-700 does not extend to engines installed on the classic aircraft, which we have in our fleet. Besides, our aircraft are maintained in accordance with the approved maintenance programme and manufacturer maintenance document,” Air Peace said.

 NTSB said there is need to check the engine type because similar incident happened in 2016, although there was no loss of lives, but the plane made an emergency landing in Pensacola, Florida. The FAA responded 10 months later with a recommendation that airlines use ultrasound to inspect their engine fan blades. Though most airlines have complied with that counsel, the agency thought the matter significantly urgent that it has begun the laborious federal process to mandate that every airline carry out the inspections.

 By the time FAA concludes its findings on the engine type, it may likely direct that such engines should be suspended from use and this would cost airlines huge resources replacing the engines. Meanwhile, southwest Airlines flights are disrupted due to the ongoing findings. </s> NTSB investigators check the damage to the engine on the plane of Southwest Flight 1380, on April 17, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Southwest Airlines said it hasn’t found any additional evidence of the metal fatigue on jet engine fan blades that led to last week’s fatal accident after inspecting 8,500 of the components.

“With the inspections we have stepped up since last week, we have had no findings at this point, which is obviously what we would expect,” Chief Executive Officer Gary Kelly said in a quarterly earnings call with analysts on Thursday.

Responding to last week’s fatal accident on Southwest Flight 1380, the airline has been racing to inspect fan blades on the engine model that failed. It has about 35,500 fan blades in its fleet, 17,000 of which were inspected before the accident. Since speeding up checks after an emergency inspection order last week, the company has about 10,000 more to look at, according to Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven.

The inspections of one of the most common jet engines in the world were carried out under an emergency directive issued Friday by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in the wake of last week’s fatal accident in which a fan blade cracked and sent metal fragments flying, triggering an explosive decompression on the plane. A New Mexico woman was partially sucked through a window and died.

Inspections were originally triggered by a similar 2016 engine failure on a Southwest plane that also caused it to lose pressure, but no one was injured. Southwest said it found one cracked blade last year and removed it.

The engine is the CFM56-7B made by CFM International Inc., a partnership between General Electric Co. and France’s Safran SA.

Southwest expects to have inspected all its CFM56-7B engines, not just those covered under the emergency order, within 30 days.

CFM issued a release Thursday saying that 60 percent of the approximately 680 engines covered under the order issued by FAA and other nations’ aviation regulators had been inspected. </s> The exploded engine of the Southwest Airlines flight that left one passenger dead.

PARIS: US Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that it would order the inspection of 220 jet engines after investigators said a broken fan blade was the cause of an engine explosion on a Southwest Airlines flight that shattered a window and killed a passenger.

The order, called an air-worthiness directive, would require an ultrasonic inspection within the next six months of the fan blades on all CFM56-7B engines that have accrued a certain number of takeoffs.

Global airlines, too, began inspecting some Boeing 737 engines on Wednesday.

Engine-maker CFM says there are more than 8,000 of its CFM56-7B engines in operation on Boeing 737 passenger jets.

Although no cause has been ruled out, the first fatal US airline accident since 2009 is expected to focus attention on metal fatigue in engine accidents, which are rare.

An early review of Tuesday's failed Southwest engine found preliminary evidence of metal fatigue where a fan blade had broken off, Mr Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters.

"We are very concerned," Mr Sumwalt said, referring to the overall challenge of detecting slow-developing metal fatigue.

Completing the latest investigation will take about 12 to 15 months, he said.

Korean Air, Japan Airlines, Ireland's Ryanair and Canada's WestJet all said they are carrying out checks. Not all airlines operating 737s are affected. </s> The National Transportation Safety Board will likely take more than a year to determine what caused the catastrophic failure of an engine on Southwest Flight 1380, rupturing the cabin and killing a passenger. No surprise, then, that nobody’s waiting for the final verdict to try to stop it from happening again.

The NTSB says the engine failed after one of the blades that make up the fan at the front of the CMF56-7B engine sheared off, at 32,500 feet. Investigators found signs of metal fatigue in the blade’s stumpy remains. Here, “fatigue” essentially means weakening—a possible result of subjecting metal alloys to the extreme temperatures and heavy loads that come with every flight. The regular expansion and contraction of the metal can exaggerate the smallest defects, like micro fractures, to the point where they become dangerous.

So the CMF56-7B, made by CFM International (a joint venture between Safran and General Electric) and bolted to 6,700 planes around the world, is getting a lot of extra attention. Southwest crews will spend the next 30 days inspecting hundreds of its CFM engines, according to Reuters. And the Federal Aviation Administration says it will issue an airworthiness directive within the next two weeks, requiring all airlines run an ultrasonic inspection of all 24 fan blades on every CFM56-7B they use, after it has been through a certain number of takeoff and landing cycles.

The ultrasonic bit is important, since the fatigue on the blown engine was on the interior of the snapped blade, according to the NTSB, where it would have been hard to spot in a visual inspection.

Much like a doctor inspecting an expectant mother, technicians go back and forth over each blade with a hand-held sensor, pulsing ultrasonic waves through the metal, looking for defects. The results don’t came back as an image, but more like an EKG graph, says Antonios Kontsos, an expert in structural fatigue and failure detection at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Cracks in the metal show up as an abnormal signal. It’s laborious, time-consuming, and the best way to see inside these all-important metals.

The FAA and NTSB are already investigating another Southwest flight, in August 2016, where this type of engine failed in midair. The plane made an emergency landing in Pensacola, Florida, without injuries. Afterward, the FAA proposed voluntary airworthiness inspections for the CMF56-7B. This time around, it’s making them mandatory.

Still, modern jet engines are a paragon of reliability. Failures—ie, In-flight Engine Shutdowns—cause less than 3 percent of flight diversions. That’s largely because airlines have robust inspection and maintenance programs. As engines cost up to $30 million and are the main thing keeping air between the plane and the ground, they’re worth looking after. KLM, for example, says the CF6-80E, which powers its Airbus A330s, needs major maintenance about every 7,300 takeoff and landing cycles, and minor maintenance every 200 to 400 cycles.

At Delta’s Atlanta maintenance facility—which is the size of 47 football fields—techs dismantle entire engines. They clean and inspect every part, from the albatross-like fan blades to the tiny component inside the fuel injector. It takes them 50 to 80 days to do that, replacing the worn out bits and putting everything back together. They then haul the refreshed engine into a bunker-like concrete cell, where they run it at speed to verify it is indeed good as new. Only then do they bolt the thing back onto a jet wing and let it return to work.

Long before they get to fly, new engine types go through a bruising array of tests—ingesting water, ice, sand from all over the world, and dead chickens. And when they are in service, airlines collect reams of data on vibration, temperature, and speed, hoping to spot problems before they become catastrophic.

In the future, a new generation of ultrasound and infrared sensors, built into the engines, could detect structural defects before they present any danger at all. “It would be a paradigm shift, integrating diagnostics and prognostics,” says Kontsos, who is working with military and commercial operators to develop such systems. “You could infer the engine health as you fly or operate the device.”

As with all such aviation advances, it will be years, at a minimum, before such sensors can make their way onto real, people-packed airplanes. Until then, we’ll have to rely on the men and women building—and rebuilding—those engines to keep us in the air.
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• A day with the zombies who help airports practice plane crashes </s> The FAA has ordered inspections on engine fan blades like the one that snapped off a Southwest Airlines plane, leading to the death of a woman who was partially blown out a window.

The Federal Aviation Administration's announcement late Wednesday comes nearly a year after the engine's manufacturer recommended the additional inspections, and a month after European regulators ordered their airlines to do the work.

Pressure for the FAA to act grew after an engine on a Southwest plane blew apart on Tuesday, showering the aircraft with debris and shattering a window.

A woman sitting next to the window was partially blown out and died of her injuries. The plane, which was headed from New York to Dallas, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

Investigators said a blade that broke off mid-flight and triggered the fatal accident was showing signs of metal fatigue - microscopic cracks that can splinter open under the kind of stress placed on jetliners and their engines.

The National Transportation Safety Board also blamed metal fatigue for an engine failure on a Southwest plane in Florida in 2016.

That led manufacturer CFM International, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and France's Safran SA, to recommend last June that airlines conduct the inspections of fan blades on many Boeing 737s.

The FAA proposed making the recommendation mandatory in August but never issued a final decision.

On Wednesday, the FAA said it would issue a directive in the next two weeks to require ultrasonic inspections of fan blades on some CFM56-7B engines after they reach a certain number of takeoffs and landings. Blades that fail inspection would need to be replaced.

It was not immediately clear how many planes would be affected. Last year, the FAA estimated that an order would cover 220 engines on U.S. airlines. That number could be higher now because more engines have hit the number of flights triggering an inspection.

Southwest announced its own program for similar inspections of its 700-plane fleet over the next month. United Airlines executives said Wednesday that they had begun inspecting some of their planes.

American Airlines has about 300 planes with that type of engine, and Delta Air Lines has about 185. It will not be clear until the FAA issues its rule how many will need inspections.

Tuesday's emergency broke a string of eight straight years without a fatal accident involving a U.S. airliner.

"Engine failures like this should not occur," Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the NTSB, said Wednesday.

Sumwalt expressed concern about such a destructive engine failure but said he would not yet draw broad conclusions about the safety of CFM56 engines or the entire fleet of Boeing 737s, the most popular airliner ever built.

Federal investigators were still trying to determine how a window came out of the plane. The woman sitting next to it, identified by family members as 43-year-old Jennifer Riordan, was wearing a seat belt. Philadelphia's medical examiner said the banking executive and mother of two from Albuquerque, New Mexico, died from blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso.

It is unknown whether the FAA's original directive would have forced Southwest to quickly inspect the engine that blew up. CEO Gary Kelly said it had logged only 10,000 cycles since being overhauled.

Before Wednesday's announcement, critics accused the FAA of inaction in the face of a threat to safety.

Robert Clifford, a lawyer who is suing American Airlines over another engine explosion that caused a fire that destroyed the plane, said the FAA should have required the inspections - even if it meant grounding Boeing 737s.

"There is something going on with these engines," he said, "and the statistical likelihood of additional failures exists."

William Waldock, a safety expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, predicted the FAA's decision. He said the scope of FAA action will depend on whether investigators find fatigue in other fan blades on the broken engine.

"The first thing they probably are going to do is pull every single one of those other blades off and X-ray them to see if they've got a similar type of failure waiting to happen," he said.

The Southwest CEO protested that it is too soon to say whether Tuesday's accident is related to any other engine failures.

Kelly said the plane was inspected on Sunday and nothing appeared out of order. A spokeswoman said it was a visual inspection and oil service of the engines. The NTSB's Sumwalt said, however, that the kind of wear seen where the missing fan blade broke off would not have been visible just by looking at the engine. </s> PHILADELPHIA -- U.S. airline regulators have ordered inspections on engine fan blades like the one that snapped off a Southwest Airlines plane, leading to the death of a woman who was partially blown out a window.

The Federal Aviation Administration's announcement late Wednesday comes nearly a year after the engine's manufacturer recommended the additional inspections, and a month after European regulators ordered their airlines to do the work.

Pressure for the FAA to act grew after an engine on a Southwest plane blew apart on Tuesday, showering the aircraft with debris and shattering a window. A woman sitting next to the window was partially blown out and died of her injuries. The plane, which was headed from New York to Dallas, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

Investigators said a blade that broke off mid-flight and triggered the fatal accident was showing signs of metal fatigue -- microscopic cracks that can splinter open under the kind of stress placed on jetliners and their engines.

The National Transportation Safety Board also blamed metal fatigue for an engine failure on a Southwest plane in Florida in 2016.

That led manufacturer CFM International, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and France's Safran SA, to recommend last June that airlines conduct the inspections of fan blades on many Boeing 737s.

The FAA proposed making the recommendation mandatory in August but never issued a final decision.

On Wednesday, the FAA said it would issue a directive in the next two weeks to require ultrasonic inspections of fan blades on some CFM56-7B engines after they reach a certain number of takeoffs and landings. Blades that fail inspection would need to be replaced.

It was not immediately clear how many planes would be affected. Last year, the FAA estimated that an order would cover 220 engines on U.S. airlines. That number could be higher now because more engines have hit the number of flights triggering an inspection.

Southwest announced its own program for similar inspections of its 700-plane fleet over the next month. United Airlines executives said Wednesday that they had begun inspecting some of their planes.

American Airlines has about 300 planes with that type of engine, and Delta Air Lines has about 185. It will not be clear until the FAA issues its rule how many will need inspections.

Tuesday's emergency broke a string of eight straight years without a fatal accident involving a U.S. airliner.

"Engine failures like this should not occur," Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the NTSB, said Wednesday.

Sumwalt expressed concern about such a destructive engine failure but said he would not yet draw broad conclusions about the safety of CFM56 engines or the entire fleet of Boeing 737s, the most popular airliner ever built.

Federal investigators were still trying to determine how a window came out of the plane. The woman sitting next to it, identified by family members as 43-year-old Jennifer Riordan, was wearing a seat belt. Philadelphia's medical examiner said the banking executive and mother of two from Albuquerque, New Mexico, died from blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso.

It is unknown whether the FAA's original directive would have forced Southwest to quickly inspect the engine that blew up. CEO Gary Kelly said it had logged only 10,000 cycles since being overhauled.

Before Wednesday's announcement, critics accused the FAA of inaction in the face of a threat to safety.

Robert Clifford, a lawyer who is suing American Airlines over another engine explosion that caused a fire that destroyed the plane, said the FAA should have required the inspections -- even if it meant grounding Boeing 737s.

"There is something going on with these engines," he said, "and the statistical likelihood of additional failures exists."

William Waldock, a safety expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, predicted the FAA's decision. He said the scope of FAA action will depend on whether investigators find fatigue in other fan blades on the broken engine.

"The first thing they probably are going to do is pull every single one of those other blades off and X-ray them to see if they've got a similar type of failure waiting to happen," he said.

The Southwest CEO protested that it is too soon to say whether Tuesday's accident is related to any other engine failures.

Kelly said the plane was inspected on Sunday and nothing appeared out of order. A spokeswoman said it was a visual inspection and oil service of the engines. The NTSB's Sumwalt said, however, that the kind of wear seen where the missing fan blade broke off would not have been visible just by looking at the engine. </s> Southwest Airlines says it has canceled roughly 1 percent of its scheduled flights as it carries out inspections prompted by an engine failure that led to a passenger’s death last week. About 40 flights were affected.

The affected Southwest Boeing 737 took off Tuesday morning from New York, headed for Dallas. About 20 minutes into the flight, at about 32,500 feet, a fan blade broke off the engine and shrapnel shattered a window.

Jennifer Riordan, 43, and a mother of two, was almost sucked out of the broken window and pulled back inside by fellow passengers. She died from blunt force trauma at a hospital after the plane’s emergency landing in Philadelphia.

After the incident, Southwest Airlines said it was accelerating its existing engine inspection program relating to the CFM56 engine family “out of an abundance of caution” over the following 30 days.

In a statement Sunday it said that its flight cancellations had been minimal.

“We have minimized flight disruptions this past week through actions such as proactive aircraft routings to cover open trips, performing inspections overnight, and utilizing spare aircraft, when available. On Sunday, we only canceled about 40 flights due to fan blade inspections out of a planned schedule of almost 4,000 flights,” the airline said.

Southwest said its cancellations were the result of a “voluntary, accelerated engine fan blade inspection program” rather than inspections ordered by US and European aviation authorities. It recommended customers check their flights’ status on its website.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) each issued an emergency airworthiness directive on Friday requiring airlines to perform an ultrasonic inspection of certain CFM56-7B engines within 20 days.

The FAA and EASA directives came on the same day that the engine manufacturer, CFM International, issued a service bulletin recommending the CFM56-7B engine be inspected more frequently.

“CFM recommends ultrasonic inspections within the next 20 days to fan blades of CFM56-7B engines with more than 30,000 cycles since new,” it said. “Also, it recommends inspections by the end of August for fan blades with 20,000 cycles, and inspections to all other fan blades when they reach 20,000 cycles.”

After reaching a certain age, the engines should be inspected approximately every two years, the manufacturer said.

According to CFM International, about 680 engines will be impacted by the order to inspect engines with more than 30,000 cycles within the next 20 days. More than 150 of those have already been checked by operators, it said.

Another 2,500 engines will be impacted by the recommendation to inspect fan blades with 20,000 cycles by the end of August, CFM International said. A jet engine cycle comprises an engine start, takeoff and landing, and full shut down.

“The inspection, conducted on-wing with an ultrasonic probe along the surface of the fan blade, takes about four hours per engine,” the manufacturer said.

US federal safety investigators have said the naked eye cannot detect the cracks and signs of metal fatigue that doomed the engine on Southwest Flight 1380. </s> (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said it will order inspections of at least 220 aircraft engines as investigators are focusing on a broken fan blade in an engine that exploded Tuesday on a Southwest Aiirlines flight, killing a passenger.

The regulator said late on Wednesday it plans to finalize the air-worthiness directive within the next two weeks.

The order, which it initially proposed in August following an engine failure in 2016 on another Southwest Airlines Co flight, will require ultrasonic inspection within the next six months of fan blades on all CFM56-7B engines that have accrued a certain number of takeoffs, while others will need inspections within 18 months.

Airlines said that because fan blades may have been repaired and moved to other engines, the order would affect far more than 220 of the CFM56-7Bs, which are made by a partnership of France’s Safran and General Electric.

An FAA official acknowledged the total number covered may be higher. Some critics have questioned why the FAA did not move faster, when European regulators issued an April 2 directive ordering similar CFM56-7B inspections within nine months.

The CFM56 engine on Southwest flight 1380 blew apart over Pennsylvania on Tuesday, about 20 minutes after the Dallas-bound flight left New York’s LaGuardia Airport with 149 people on board. The explosion sent shrapnel ripping into the fuselage of the Boeing 737-700 plane and shattered a window.

Bank executive Jennifer Riordan, 43, was killed when she was partially pulled through the gaping hole as the cabin suffered rapid decompression. Fellow passengers were able to pull her back inside but she died of her injuries.

Videos posted on social media showed passengers grabbing for oxygen masks and screaming as the plane, piloted by Tammie Jo Shults, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, prepared for the descent into Philadelphia.

Shults and the first officer in a joint statement declined media interviews. “We all feel we were simply doing our jobs. Our hearts are heavy,” the pair said.

On Wednesday, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairman Robert Sumwalt said the incident began when one of the engine’s 24 fan blades snapped off from its hub. Investigators found that the blade had suffered metal fatigue at the point of the break.

Sumwalt said he could not yet say if the incident, the first deadly passenger airline accident in the United States since 2009, pointed to a fleet-wide problem in the Boeing 737-700.

Southwest crews were inspecting similar engines the airline had in service, focusing on the 400 to 600 oldest of the CFM56 engines, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

It was the second time this kind of engine had failed on a Southwest jet in the past two years, prompting airlines around the world to step up inspections.

A NTSB inspection crew was also combing over the Boeing 737-700 for signs of what caused the engine to explode.

Investigators expected to remain on the scene into the weekend but the NTSB did not plan any media update on Thursday. The NTSB investigation could take 12 to 15 months to complete, Sumwalt said.

Sumwalt said the fan blade, after suffering metal fatigue where it attached to the engine hub, has a second fracture about halfway along its length. Pieces of the plane were found in rural Pennsylvania by investigators who tracked them on radar. The metal fatigue would not have been observable by looking at the engine from the outside, Sumwalt said.

The GE-Safran partnership that built the engine said it was sending about 40 technicians to help with Southwest’s inspections. Southwest said it expected to wrap up its inspection of the engines it was targeting in 30 days.

In August 2016, a Southwest flight made a safe emergency landing in Pensacola, Florida, after a fan blade separated from the same type of engine and debris ripped a hole above the left wing. That incident prompted the FAA to propose last year that similar fan blades undergo ultrasonic inspections and be replaced if they failed. </s> (Reuters) - 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 U.S. 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.

“I thought, these are my last few moments on Earth and I want people to know what happened,” Martinez said.

Southwest Airlines experienced an unrelated safety incident early on Wednesday when a Phoenix-bound flight was forced to land at Nashville airport shortly after takeoff because of bird strike.

The airline said it would inspect the fan blades of CFM56 engines on all of its 737 jets within 30 days. Minimal flight disruptions may result, it said.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said on Tuesday at the Philadelphia airport that a preliminary investigation found an engine fan blade missing, having apparently broken off, and that there was metal fatigue at the point where it would normally be attached.

Sumwalt said the investigation could take 12 to 15 months to complete.

In August 2016, a Southwest flight made a safe emergency landing in Pensacola, Florida, after a fan blade separated from the same type of engine and debris ripped a hole above the left wing. That incident prompted the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to propose last year that similar fan blades undergo ultrasonic inspections and be replaced if they failed.

Riordan’s death was the first in a U.S. commercial aviation accident since 2009, according to NTSB statistics.

Riordan was a Wells Fargo banking executive and well-known community volunteer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to a Wells Fargo official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The United States National Transportation Safety Board declares metal fatigue caused a fan blade failure that killed a passenger on April 16, the same issue behind a similar accident on another Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 in 2016. The Federal Aviation Administration announces mandatory ultrasonic inspections on fan blades fitted to CFM56-7B engines of which around 8,000 are flying worldwide.