(MENAFN- Bangladesh Monitor) Philadelphia :
Tens of thousands of feet above the earth, the Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 passengers clasped hands with strangers, prayed together and got ready to die.
As Southwest flight climbed above 30,000 feet on its way from New York to Dallas, it was around 11 a.m., 20 minutes into a four-hour flight, as they skimmed above the clouds and waited for flight attendants to hand out drinks.
Then, with a deafening roar, the twin-engine Boeing 737 Flight 1380 with 149 people on board became a midair scene of chaos and terror.
With no apparent warning, the plane's left engine exploded and a gust of shrapnel blew out a window. Oxygen masks dropped down and the plane plunged thousands of feet in a minute.
A woman passenger being partially blown out into the sky, later died due to impact trauma and seven people were hurt. 's medical examiner says that a woman, Jennifer Riordan, died of blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso.
Spokesman James Garrow of the Department of Public Health said that Jennifer Riordan's death was ruled accidental.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), airline regulators say they will issue a directive in the next two weeks to require inspections of certain CFM56-7B engines fan blades, like the one involved in fatal failure that that made an emergency landing in .
That's the type of engine that suffered a failure on a Southwest Airlines plane on Tuesday. Debris from the engine hit the plane and damaged a window,.
The directive will require ultrasonic inspections of fan blades when they reach a certain number of takeoffs and landings. Blades that fail inspection will have to be replaced.
Federal investigators are still trying to figure out how the window came out of the plane. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chairman Robert Sumwalt says that the woman was wearing a seatbelt and sitting next to the window.
A federal investigator says that a crack on the interior of a jet engine is what led to the failure that shot debris at the plane, leading to the death of a passenger.
National Transportation Safety Board chairman Robert Sumwalt said at a news conference that one of the 24 blades in the Southwest Airlines 737's engine fractured from metal fatigue.
NTSB chief is very concerned about Tuesday's engine failure, but would not extrapolate that to the CFM56 engines or the entire fleet of Boeing 737s. The plane is the most popular airliner ever built.
(Report Agencies)
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