Airplane Engine Explodes, Killing Passenger Midair

One person was killed on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas when an engine exploded in midair Tuesday, shattering a window that passengers said partially sucked a woman outside of the aircraft.

The explosion, which one passenger said happened about a half-hour into the flight, prompted a desperate effort among flight attendants and passengers to save the woman.

“I think, like most passengers, I thought I was going to die,” the passenger, Matt Tranchin, 34, said.

On Tuesday night, an official with the New Mexico Broadcasters Association identified the deceased victim as Jennifer Riordan, of Albuquerque.

The plane, Flight 1380, which made an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport at about 11:20 a.m. Eastern time, quickly lost altitude after the explosion and violently depressurized after fragments from the explosion burst through the window, said Max Kraidelman, 20, a college student who was on the flight. A woman near the window was partially sucked out, he said.

“The top half of her torso was out the window,” he said. “There was a lot of blood because she was hit by some of the shrapnel coming off the engine after it exploded.”

Kraidelman said passengers and flight attendants struggled “to drag her back into the aircraft.” When they did, she was unconscious and seriously injured, and flight attendants and passengers tried to revive her. Upon seeing the scene, one flight attendant began to cry, Tranchin said.

“They were doing CPR on her and using the defibrillator while we were landing,” Kraidelman said. “They were working on her while everyone else had their oxygen mask on.”

Tranchin said that one of the passengers helping had at one point placed his lower back up against the opening in the plane, in an apparent effort to help with the compression. The man did this for the next 20 minutes, Tranchin said, adding that the man later told him that the pressure at his back had been extreme.

In the meantime, passengers wept and screamed for roughly 10 or 15 minutes, oxygen masks strapped to their faces, Kraidelman said. The cabin smelled like smoke, and ash was swirling through the ventilation system, Tranchin added.

Tranchin said he spent those precious minutes texting goodbyes to people important in his life.

“It’s a wild experience,” he said. “It’s not a couple minutes of freaking out and frantically saying goodbye; it’s 25 minutes of sustained fear that this was the end.”

“What do you say to your pregnant wife and your parents in your final moments?” he added. “That’s what I was trying to figure out.”

Tranchin said he wanted his wife to tell his son how important it is to follow his dreams; he wanted to tell her to find love again.

About two minutes before the plane landed, passengers got cellphone reception, so he called his wife and told her they were about to make the emergency landing.

As the craft descended, “it was shaking, it was vibrating, it was tilting to one side,” Kraidelman said.

“At that point,” Tranchin said, “I thought I had a better than 50-50 chance of surviving.”

“You can see the ground, we’re level,” he continued. “It’s crash landing, but it’s doable.” That the landing ended up being smooth was “nothing short of extraordinary,” he said.

As the injured woman was taken off the plane, it became especially clear just how serious her injuries were, Tranchin said.

“There was a significant amount of blood,” he said.

Officials later said that one person had died in the episode and that seven had minor injuries. It was the first time a passenger had died in an accident on an American airline since 2009, according to The Associated Press.

The Philadelphia Fire Department said firefighters soon found a fuel leak and a small fire in one of the plane’s two engines, which had been mangled by the blast.

“At this point the NTSB is classifying this as an engine failure,” Robert L. Sumwalt, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a news conference. He said the exact nature of the failure was unclear, but that “we do know that parts came off the engine.”

“This is a sad day, and on behalf of the entire Southwest family I want to extend my deepest sympathies for the family and the loved ones of our deceased customer,” Gary C. Kelly, the company’s chief executive, said in a video posted to YouTube.

The flight, which was on its way from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Dallas Love Field, was a Boeing 737 with 143 passengers and five Southwest employees on board, the airline said.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it had sent a team to Philadelphia to investigate the episode.