What the initial probe suggests happened leading up to passenger partially sucked out of plane window

A Ryanair plane takes off from Budapest Airport in Budapest, Hungary on June 12, 2022. (Anna Szilagyi / AP Photo)

Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said on Monday that an initial finding from a probe into an incident in which a passenger was partly sucked out of a Boeing 737’s broken window suggested “foreign object damage” and was not due to the aircraft’s age or servicing conditions.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the July 10 incident, in which a piece of engine broke off the aircraft and smashed the window shortly after takeoff from Thessaloniki in Greece, according to video and the Federal Aviation Administration. The plane, headed to Germany, lost pressure and made an emergency landing.

“Initial indication would suggest it looks like a foreign object damage to the engine on takeoff at Thessaloniki, but we don’t have, we can’t say that definitively,” O’Leary told analysts after Ryanair’s results for the April-June quarter.

O’Leary said the aircraft was 18 years old and its engine had been fully serviced and overhauled within the last two years. He added that a draft report on the incident would be issued in about 28 days, followed by a more detailed report.

The event, which had echoes of two Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 NG flights in 2016 and 2018, prompted a re-evaluation of the response to those incidents, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told Reuters last week.

Confirmation that damage was caused by an external object could reduce Boeing’s and Ryanair’s responsibilities over the incident.

Reporting by Conor Humphries in Dublin, writing by Alessandro Parodi in Gdansk; Editing by Matt Scuffham, Kirsten Donovan, Reuters