'It appeared that we had time': How the FAA missed a chance to save Jennifer Riordan
Source: Washington Post
‘It appeared that we had time’: How the FAA missed a chance to save Jennifer Riordan
By Michael Laris
Transportation reporter
12/2/2019, 7:58:43 p.m.
The woman in 14A was settled into her window seat, buckled in for the flight home. Moments later, with a sudden burst of violence at 32,000 feet, the window was gone.
Fan blade No. 13 had broken off inside the left engine, hurling shrapnel against the side of the plane. Her window disappeared out over the eastern Pennsylvania countryside, and Jennifer Riordan’s upper body was sucked halfway through the opening left behind.
During the 17 wrenching minutes that followed on that April morning last year, pilots struggled to guide the hobbled plane to an emergency landing and passengers fought to save the mother of two from Albuquerque, leaving a legacy of heroism in an incident that travelers around the world may have taken as a nightmarish, if seemingly random, accident.
In fact, federal regulators and the companies that built and flew Riordan’s plane knew from experience that such a scenario was possible. Nineteen months earlier, in August 2016, a fan blade had broken off in the same model engine on the same model Southwest plane over Mississippi.
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The Federal Aviation Administration began crafting a proposal for more inspections after the first engine failure. But it did not order those inspections until after the failure repeated itself on Riordan’s flight.
The FAA’s halting response troubled some inside the agency who say it fit a pattern of giving too much deference to industry — including airplane manufacturers and their suppliers, airlines and others. The issue has taken on added urgency following the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/it-appeared-that-we-had-time-how-the-faa-missed-a-chance-to-save-jennifer-riordan/2019/12/02/671d48c2-ef81-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html
