Evidence of bird strike after man nearly sucked out of plane window, NTSB says
A bird strike may have been the cause of an incident in which a passenger was nearly sucked out of a broken window aboard a Ryanair flight in Europe last month, the NTSB found.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating an incident on Ryanair Flight 1879, a Boeing 737, on July 10. The aircraft experienced a failure in its No. 2 engine minutes after takeoff from Thessaloniki, Greece, en route to Memmingen, Germany. A fan blade broke off, sending debris out of the engine and damaging the aircraft fuselage, including a passenger window in row 11.
A 61-year-old Serbian man was partially sucked out of the plane and suffered serious injuries. Engine fragments breached the fuselage, causing the cabin to depressurize. The NTSB found evidence of bird remains inside the faulty engine, including feathers. Three loose fan blade fragments were recovered. The plane had been involved in four reported bird strikes in the past year, and bird remains had been found in two of those cases.
The NTSB is awaiting final reports from the Smithsonian Institution Feather Identification Lab in Washington, D.C.
Written by urgent.news from CBS News's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
