The pilots on board the Southwest Airlines flight that was forced to make an emergency landing when a passenger was partially sucked through a window and killed have spoken about the ordeal for the first time.
“My first thoughts were actually, ‘Oh, here we go,’ just because it seemed like a flashback to some of the Navy flying that we had done,” Shults told ABC News.
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“We had to use hand signals because it was loud. And... it was just hard to communicate for a lot of different reasons.”
Her colleague, First Officer Darren Ellisor, said: “We were passing through about 32,000 feet when we heard a large bang and a rapid decompression. The aircraft yawed and banked to the left, a little over 40 degrees, and we had a very severe vibration from the No 1 engine that was shaking everything. And, that all kind of happened all at once."
Jennifer Riordan, 43, a banking executive from New Mexico, died after suffering fatal injuries when she was partially sucked through a window that was shattered by shrapnel from the engine explosion.
The US National Transportation Safety Board revealed this week that it was a fragment of the engine cowling, not a fan blade, that had struck the window of the Southwest plane, resulting in depressurisation of the aircraft and Riordan’s death.
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