Woman Partially Sucked Out of Jet When Window Breaks Mid-Flight; Plane Lands Safely in Philadelphia

[Nac Mac Feegle]

42. I am not an expert

But I have a LOT of experience dealing with Failure Modes of equipment.

Initial reports are that it happened during / shortly after takeoff, when the engine is at the most power setting of the trip. Fully fueled, full passenger and luggage complement requires a lot of power to get airborne. A micro-crack in the turbine blade from ingesting a bird or large bug or small piece of debris or just age. When the turbine (literally, in this case) grenades, there's a containment ring that's supposed to contain the shrapnel. But if there's enough shrapnel with enough energy, something can get past it. If it's going toward the fuselage, in this case the window, shit's going to get Really Interesting really fast.

The pilot and crew have to Keep Their Shit Together to get the aircraft on the ground on one piece, which is something it sounds like they did quite well.

This is a tragedy for the family of the woman that was In The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time. Of course it was, and anyone that says any different deserves the strongest condemnation.

But it could have been so much worse. See the above mentioned Hawaii Airlines flight.

The Engineering for the possibility of such a failure as this can account for almost all contingencies, but sooner or later, that "one in a million" event is going to happen.

Then we have an incident like this.

Maybe it could have been prevented: Maybe Deregulation leads to outsourcing of maintenance, and someone misses something. Maybe something is dropped on the runway. Maybe a bird takes a left instead of a right. We don't know yet. The NTSB will do its' damnedest to find out.

There's no profit in "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" the incident. Meanwhile, we can bury the dear departed and do our best to console the survivors. We have to let the Experts do their jobs to figure out what happened, Then we make sure something like this doesn't happen again. Out of respect for those whom we have lost.

Sometimes lessons come at a high cost. We have to make sure that payment is not wasted.