Southwest pilots forced to use hand signals on window blast flight

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.

Captain Tammie Shults, one of the first female fighter pilots in the US Navy, was praised by passengers on the Southwest Flight 1380 for her composure during the crisis on 17 April. She spoke calmly to air traffic controllers and made an emergency landing in Philadelphia, according to Time magazine.

“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.