A horrifying simulation has revealed what happened to a woman that was brutally sucked out of a plane window.
During a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas in April 2018, Jennifer Riordan fell victim to a freak incident while the plane was 32,000 feet in the air.
The vice president of community relations for Wells Fargo bank was travelling back from a business trip in the Big Apple, when the Boeing 737 blew an engine.
Advert
After this incident, parts of the engine flew out and smashed the window next to the mother-of-two, de-pressurising the cabin and causing her to get sucked out of the plane, while passengers near her tried their best to get her back inside.
Riordan hung halfway out of the window for minutes as other passengers fought to stop her from flying out completely by holding on to her legs.
One passenger revealed that Riordan was out of the plane from her waist up, as several passengers rushed to her aid from several rows behind as per Sky News.
They eventually managed to get her back into the cabin, giving her CPR while they plugged the hole in the window, but unfortunately, Riordan had suffered some serious head trauma and injuries which she later died from, while seven other passengers suffered from minor injuries.
It may sound terrifying, but a YouTube account has now posted a chilling simulation of what Riordan and passengers experienced when she was sucked out of the cabin, have a look:
The simulation shows how fatal it proved for Riordan to have her head coming into contact with wind blowing at her at hundreds of miles an hour, as her torso and arm dangling in the air.
It even reveals the shock of the engine breaking off and debris smashing the passenger window, as Riordan became the first passenger to die in an accident involving a US airline since 2009.
The airplane rerouted, landing in Philadelphia instead of New York, with all 143 passengers and five cabin crew members putting on oxygen masks as they braced for impact.
Upon landing, passengers walked off the plane to the tarmac, as firefighters attended to the broken left engine of the Boeing 737.
Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel explained that the passengers did 'some pretty amazing things under some pretty difficult circumstances', Sky News reported.
Passenger Alfred Tumlinson also praised pilot Tammie Jo Shults as she checked on the well-being of all passengers: "She has nerves of steel. That lady, I applaud her.
"I'm going to send her a Christmas card, I'm going to tell you that, with a gift certificate for getting me on the ground.
"She was awesome."
After this incident, there was an initial investigation followed by several preliminary findings and then a number of investigative hearings by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), with the final report being released on 19 November, 2019.
When detailing what the probable cause of the accident was, it read: "The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determines that the probable cause of this accident was a low-cycle fatigue crack in the dovetail of fan blade No. 13, which resulted in the fan blade separating in flight and impacting the engine fan case at a location that was critical to the structural integrity and performance of the fan cowl structure.
"This impact led to the in-flight separation of fan cowl components, including the inboard fan cowl aft latch keeper, which struck the fuselage near a cabin window and caused the window to depart from the airplane, the cabin to rapidly depressurise and the passenger fatality."
Joshua Nair