A 61-year old Serbian man was partially blasted out of a Ryanair jet as the flight departed Thessaloniki in Greece bound for Germany Friday. He was sitting by the right side window when it suddenly fractured, the result of an what seems to be an uncontained failure in the right engine. In this video, posted to Reddit, several fan blades appear to be broken and more are damaged. There is a sizeable hole in the engine nacelle. The broken out window is above this engine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/s/OTXd69iCfp
The 18 year old plane is a Boeing 737 NG equipped with CFM engines that have previously been a source of concern and the subject of inspections following what appear to be similar events. The engine in the photo below failed on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 in 2018 and debris punctured the window, causing a passenger, Jennifer Riordan, to be partially jettisoned from the plane. Though flight attendants and passengers hung on to her, she did not survive her injuries.
Investigators examine damage to Flight 1380’s CFM56-7B Engine following a deadly failure in 2018. (Credit: NTSB)
The crew of Ryanair Flight 1879 over Greece reportedly detected an engine problem around the time the plane reached 13 thousand feet. They began a return to the airport.
It seems likely that the engine then began to come apart and debris punctured the window triggering a fast depressurization of the plane. At 13-thousand feet, the interior cabin pressure is about 8 pounds per square inch so you get an idea of the force of the air racing toward the hole by where the Serbian was sitting. His wife and others hung onto him for the duration of the flight.
This was a good outcome considering previous instances when engine failures did not remain contained in the housing. Most recent is the accident that killed Ms. Riordan in 2018.
In 1996, a failure of a Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 on a Delta MD-88 that was taxiing on the runway killed two people and injured two others when fan blades flew into the cabin.
The Ryanair accident shares its lucky landing with Southwest Airlines 3472, a flight from New Orleans to Orlando that lost its left engine at 31-thousand feet in 2016. A fan blade came apart triggering more destruction and propelling debris into the fuselage, tail and wing. This cabin penetration also created a rapid decompression and frantic moments for the passengers and crew, but no one was injured. The plane made an emergency landing in Pensacola, Florida.
In an article I wrote for The New York Times in 2018, I explain that while airplanes get all the attention, they cannot achieve anything without equally impressive advancements in engines. For decades it has been the engines that lead advancements in airliner capabilities. Each new engine has to be more powerful than the newest plane. So while it shouldn’t be the case, engine failures don’t get the attention that airplane accidents do until they self-destruct as Friday’s evidently did, in a spectacular way.
