A Ryanair Holdings Plc flight was forced to make an emergency landing in Greece on Friday morning after a window on the Boeing Co. 737 dislodged soon after takeoff, causing panic on board after one passenger was reportedly partially sucked out of the cabin.
A window in the cabin “dislodged inflight,” the airline said in a statement, and one passenger received medical assistance on the ground in Thessaloniki, where the flight had originated. The carrier didn’t identify the passenger or the cause of the blown-out window.
Greece’s Athens New Agency reported that one cabin occupant was partly pulled out of the open window and was held back by fellow travelers and his seat belt. According to state broadcaster ERT, the window came undone after a projectile from a faulty engine hit the side of the aircraft.
The plane had just taken off from Thessaloniki and was bound for Memmingen in Germany when the incident occurred, according to Ryanair. A replacement aircraft eventually flew passengers to their original destination.
Boeing said it’s in contact with Ryanair following the incident. The engines on the 737NG aircraft, which was delivered in 2008, are made by CFM International Inc., a joint venture between General Electric Co. and Safran SA of France. CFM said it’s supporting customers and ready to help with the investigation.
The probe into the incident is probably going to last a year, but teams could have important answers within the next two or three days, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigation chief for the Federal Aviation Administration.
“I am suspicious of the structural components around the engine coming off because that’s happened before with the 737 as well as the 777,” Guzzetti said.
Structural damage or faults on fuselage components like windows or doors are extremely rare in flight. The most notable incident in recent years involved an Alaska Air Group Inc. Boeing 737 that suffered a door-plug blow-out mid flight because of sloppy workmanship, plunging the US manufacturer into a prolonged crisis.
In 2018, a Southwest Airlines Co. jetliner made an unscheduled landing after a window cracked, two weeks after an accident on a separate plane in which a passenger was partially sucked out of a destroyed window and died.
Guzzetti noted one key aspect of the Ryanair incident: the plane was flying at a lower altitude than the Southwest jet.
“Luckily, that window broke that only 15,000 feet in the air,” he said. In the Southwest accident, the fatality happened because it took place at a much higher altitude and “that person got sucked out of a broken window because the pressure differential was much higher, and the forces were much higher.”
Ryanair, Europe’s biggest budget carrier, flies an all-Boeing fleet of more than 600 jets, with another 300 Boeing 737 Max 10 models on order, according to its website. The window on a 737 typically measures 10 by 14 inches.
Photograph: A Boeing 737 jet, operated by Ryanair Holdings Plc; photo credit: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
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