Safety board considers cause of jet’s fatal engine blow-out
AP
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In this Jan. 25, 2019, file photo a Southwest Airlines jet moves on the runway as a person eats at a terminal restaurant at LaGuardia Airport in New York. (Photo: AP)

The National Transportation Safety Board is meeting to consider the cause of a deadly engine failure on a Southwest Airlines flight last year.

The incident killed a passenger who was blown partly out of the plane when a piece of the engine shattered the window next to her.

The safety board met Tuesday in Washington to vote on the probable cause of the accident. It had held an investigative hearing in November 2018.

According to preliminary findings, a fan blade in one engine broke, starting a cascade of events that led to the engine blowing apart more than 30,000 feet over Pennsylvania. The broken window caused an immediate decompression of the cabin — oxygen masks dropped, debris swirled through the cabin, and the air temperature plunged. The plane rolled sharply to the left.

Jennifer Riordan, a 43-year-old banker and mother of two, died from her injuries — the first passenger to be killed on a US airline flight in more than nine years. Eight other passengers suffered minor injuries.

Pilots struggled to control the plane but were able to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia with the one remaining working engine.

The incident led to more intensive inspections of fan blades on certain engines made by CFM International, which led to the discovery of about 15 other cracked fan blades on planes flown by several different airlines.

The 24 fan blades on the Southwest jet had been used on more than 32,000 flights and overhauled twice. The NTSB concluded that the doomed fan blade was already cracked at the time of the last overhaul, but the damage wasn’t spotted using methods then in use.

However, April 17, 2018, the incident was not the first failure of a fan blade on the CFM engines. Another Southwest plane experienced a similar breakage in 2016. Pilots on that plane made an emergency landing in Pensacola, Florida.

After the accident, the Federal Aviation Administration required more frequent inspections using electrical current and ultrasound.