PHILADELPHIA _ A passenger on Southwest Flight 1380 described the sudden noise when the plane's engine blew sounding like "a marble hitting glass."
Then, a deafening roar as the plane depressurized.
Flight attendants trying to ensure passengers were receiving air through emergency masks that dropped from the ceiling recalled the noise, coupled with the sudden pressure drop's affect on their ears, leaving them nearly deafened.
"Because of the pressure in her ears, she could barely hear anything," according to documents federal safety officials released Wednesday, describing the experience of flight attendant Rachel Fernheimer that morning, April 17, 2018. "The cabin was loud and windy."
Fernheimer tried to remember her training and walked along the plane's aisle, holding hands, telling passengers they would be OK, saying the plane would land. She couldn't know that, though. Over the noise she couldn't hear anything from the flight crew. She checking on passenger's oxygen masks, some of which she noted had air hoses that had come loose. She reconnected those tubes to the plane's oxygen supply, and showed other passengers how to wear the masks properly.
When she reached row 14 of the two-engine jet, a horrifying sight greeted her. The head, torso, and arms of the woman in seat 14A had been sucked outside a 10.5-by-14.37-inch window. Another flight attendant, Seanique Mallory, was pulling on the woman's body. Fernheimer got on the floor and grabbed one of the woman's legs. As they struggled to keep the woman, Jennifer Riordan, 43, inside the plane, a passenger reached out of the window and grasped the woman's shoulder. The pressure had begun to equalize, and the passenger pulled in her arm, then her head. The New Mexico woman's injuries would turn out to be fatal.
New details about the Boeing 737-700 that lost an engine over Philadelphia emerged from a trove of information included in hundreds of pages released by the National Transportation Safety Board before a 9 a.m. hearing in Washington, D.C. The jet carried 144 passengers and five crew members.
The engine blew over Schuylkill County after one of its fan blades broke and shredded both the engine and its casing. Pilot Tammie Jo Shults _ one of the first female fighter pilots in the United States Navy _ was able to land the craft, which took off from New York City's LaGuardia Airport and was headed to Love Field in Dallas, about 20 minutes later at Philadelphia International Airport, with all those on board but Riordan surviving with minimal injuries.
Cockpit recordings, released hours after the incident, captured Shults' description of her plane's condition to the air traffic controller:
"Yeah, we have, uh, part of the aircraft missing, so we're going to need to slow down a bit."
