Investigators released their first report on Thursday into how a Ryanair passenger ended up partially sucked out of a plane window.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report found that a fan blade broke off from the right engine, and engine fragments damaged the fuselage and shattered a window.
On July 10, the Boeing 737 was operating a flight from Thessaloniki, Greece, to Memmingen, Germany. There were 149 passengers and six crew members on board.
As the plane was climbing through 16,000 feet, the pilots received a high-vibration indication for the right engine, the report said. The crew followed the checklist, and the vibrations decreased, but then “increased significantly.”
Investigators said there was a loud bang and a cabin altitude warning. Passengers and the crew put on their oxygen masks. The pilots started an emergency descent.
One of the flight attendants then saw that some passengers were standing up and calling for help.
“The FA noticed that the passenger in seat 11F was partially lodged in a damaged cabin window, and that the entire window was missing,” investigators wrote in the report.
“Other passengers were assisting and managed to pull the injured passenger back into the cabin,” they added.
One passenger went to the front of the plane and got a metal box to block the hole.
The injured person was moved to the row behind and attended to by another passenger, who was a doctor.
After the pilots descended below 10,000 feet, where there is enough oxygen to breathe normally, they were able to fly back to Thessaloniki.
Investigators later found bird remains and feathers inside the engine, which were given to the Smithsonian Institution Feather Identification Lab for examination.
The incident is similar to one that occurred on a Southwest flight in 2018, also involving a Boeing 737 with the same type of CFM engines.
An engine blade broke off, shattered a window, and a passenger was nearly sucked out of the hole. She was pulled back in by other passengers, but later died from her injuries.
In 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration issued airworthiness directives designed to prevent the risk of broken engine fan blades being sent toward the fuselage.
The NTSB found that this work had not yet been undertaken on the Ryanair plane, but airlines are only required to do so by July 2028.
Ryanair declined to comment until the investigation is concluded.
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