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Southwest Airlines Engine Failure Results In First Fatality On US Airline In 9 Years (heavy.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Heavy: Tammie Jo Shults is the pilot who bravely flew Southwest Flight 1380 to safety after part of its left engine ripped off, damaging a window and nearly sucking a woman out of the plane. The flight was en route to Dallas Love airport from New York City, and had to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia. Shults, 56, kept her cool during an incredibly intense situation, audio from her conversation with air traffic controllers reveals, while many passengers posted on social media that they were scared these were their last moments. She, with the help of the co-pilot and the rest of the crew, landed the plane safely. The NTSB reported that there was one fatality out of 143 passengers on board. Some passengers said that someone had a heart attack during the flight, but it's not yet known if this was the fatality reported by the NTSB. The woman who died has been identified by KOAT-TV as Jennifer Riordan, 43, of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
That's the design, but in this case it hasn't been all that successful. The FAA already issued an airworthiness directive (essentially the aircraft version of a mandatory recall) for these engines because of this type of failure. So either the airline didn't comply with the requirement, it wasn't sufficient to address this known defect, or the FAA gave too much leniency in the timeline (sometimes these are phased in over time to avoid grounding too many planes at once).
So, yes, bad luck to be on the plane with the exploding engine, and sitting in the path of the flying debris, but not THAT extraordinary, because the risk of the engine fragmenting was known.
It is a really weird failure. If you look at some of the photos around the place, you can see that it appears to be only one blade that has departed, and the rest of the fan looks remarkably undamaged. Rather than breaking free and flying into the fan housing (which is designed to contain a failure), it appears to have moved forward clear of the housing, and out through the engine cowling. Presumably from there it exited into the fuselage, or other bits of the cowling/ancillaries took out the window.
But I agree, incredibly unlucky for the passenger involved. It is still quite remarkable how safe air travel is though, all things considered.
Not really the CFM56 engine in question has a history of fan blade failures. It was instrumental in the Kegworth air disaster in 1989 that after a couple more fan blade failures lead to a redesign and over 1800 CFM56's having them replaced.
There was another uncontained fan blade failure on a CFM56 on Southwest Airlines Flight 3472 in August 2016 before yesterday's incident that was another uncontained engine failure and I will lay a large sum of money that it was a fan blade failure of a CFM56 engine.
I would say that five fan blade failures on an engine is very unusual.
This is not counting the numerous fuel flow problems and flame outs due to rain/hail ingestion this engine has suffered.