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Broken engine fragments smashed a cabin window of a Ryanair plane last month causing a man’s head and right shoulder to be sucked into the hole, US investigators have said.<\/p>\n
In a preliminary report, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said this happened after an engine fan blade broke shortly after takeoff on the 10 July flight from Greece to Germany.<\/p>\n
Serbian national Ljubisa Karovi\u0107’s head and right shoulder were sucked out of the plane’s window, leaving him “seriously injured and in shock”.<\/p>\n
His wife Svetlana Grkovi\u0107 Maksimovi\u0107 later told BBC Serbia<\/a> that she and two other passengers held on to his legs for several minutes.<\/p>\n In its report, the NTSB said the flight from Thessaloniki to Memmingen “experienced a No. 2 (right) engine fan-blade-out (FBO) failure during climb out”.<\/p>\n “The crew elected to return to SKG [Thessaloniki International Airport] where they made an uneventful landing.”<\/p>\n The NTSB was “delegated the investigation in full” by the Greek authorities in the days following the incident.<\/p>\n It also detailed a timeline of events given by the flight crew, who said they received a “high vibration” engine alert during the climb.<\/p>\n In response, they reduced the engine power and carried out a series of checks. When the vibrations stopped, the crew continued to climb on autopilot, the report said.<\/p>\n But the engine vibrations then increased and the crew heard a loud bang, prompting them to declare an emergency and begin their descent.<\/p>\n Flight attendants reported hearing and feeling the vibrations, and seeing a small amount of smoke before the oxygen masks were deployed.<\/p>\n One flight attendant said they then noticed passengers calling for help after a passenger became “partially lodged in a damaged cabin window”, with the entire window missing.<\/p>\n The engine had undergone ultrasonic inspections in May this year with no findings of fault, the report stated.<\/p>\n Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary earlier suggested that the incident may have been caused by “foreign object damage” to an engine.<\/a><\/p>\n The aircraft was operated by Ryanair’s subsidiary Malta Air.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n