instead, she relied on her extensive navy experience. my first thoughts were, here we go, just because it seems like a flashback to the navy flying. reporter: she discussed the incident for the first time since the april 17th emergency that left one passenger dead. shults said she wasn t even supposed to be in the cockpit that day. she had traded with her pilot husband so she could attend her son s track meet. dean, being the amazing husband he is, said you go to the meet, and i ll take your trip. that s why i was on the trip. reporter: shortly after taking off from laguardia airport, a fan blade on the left engine broke. debris struck the body of the plane cracking one window which broke open. the passenger in the seat next to the window was pulley partially out of the aircraft was pulled partially out of the aircraft but brought back by other passengers. however, the passenger, jennifer
are you descending right now? single engine descending. reporter: when engines failed on a southwest airlines flight last month, the pilot didn t panic. instead j she relied on her extensive navy experience. my first thoughts were actually oh, here we go. just because it seems like a flashback to some of the flnavy flying we d done. reporter: she discussed the incident for the first time since the april 17th emergency that left one passenger dead. she said on abc s 20/20, she wasn t even supposed to be in the cockpit that day. she traded with her pilot husband so she could attend her son s track meet. my husband said you go to the track meet. i ll switch and take your trip. that s why i was on the trip. reporter: shortly after the plane took off, the fan blade on the left engine broke.
riordan, didn t survive. everybody was yelling and screaming. reporter: the first officer also spoke about the incident. that sing through about 32,000 feet when we had a large bang and a rapid decompression. there was shaking, everything. and it happened all at once. reporter: shults said she and her first officer used hand signals to communicate in the cockpit because of the noise level. it was loud, and it was just hard to communicate for a lot of different reasons. reporter: and almost immediately the national transportation safety board determined that metal fatigue was a key factor that caused that fan blade to detach setting off this chain of events. southwest airlines in the middle of performing these faa-required ultrasonic inspections on the engines similar to the one with the failure a month ago here.
a woman was nearly sucked out and later died. the ntsb finding two pieces of the broken fan blade inside the engine. there are thousands of inspections since the deadly incident. united airlines is issuing a new pet band that could force military families to leave their animals behind. it bans 2 dozen breeds of dogs and cats along with oversize crates. united airlines is the only pet transport service for the 7000 troops stationed in guam. they are making changes to the pet safe policy following many answers like one at german shepherd was accidentally sent to japan. censored by amazon. the online retail giant blacklisting a religious freedom group on a national day of prayer. carly shimkus with fox news headlines 24/7, joining us with
of the problem appears to be metal fatigue that caused the fan blade to snap, which is very similar, if not identical to an engine failure southwest experienced two years ago. the f.a.a. has issued an emergency air worthiness directorrive concerning the engines which are made jointly by general electric in this country and a french manufacturer. but the f.a.a. directorrive only involves about 1,000 engines total. southwest says it s doing on top of that a voluntary inspection of all the its engine. southwests has 720 planes in fleets all of them are 737 models. completing the inspection could take several days. some passengers as you might imagine clearly frustrated by the delays. most seem to be adopting the better safe than sorry motto. watch. they are safe but, like anything, you need to take care of them. especially when they get old. but the maintenance program it needs to get fixed.