A woman who was partially sucked out of a window of a US passenger plane after an engine exploded in mid-air has died.
Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 made an emergency landing in Philadelphia after a window, wings and fuselage were damaged. Seven passengers were injured.
Initial findings say an engine fan blade was missing. In a recording, one of the pilots can be heard saying "there is a hole and someone went out".
The last passenger death on a US commercial flight was in 2009.
The Boeing 737-700 had been en route from New York's La Guardia airport to Dallas, Texas, with 143 passengers and five crew when the incident happened.
Witnesses say an engine on the plane's left side blew, smashing a window and causing cabin depressurization that nearly sucked the woman out of the aircraft.
Jennifer Riordan, 43, a mother-of-two from Albuquerque, was returning from a business trip aboard the New York to Dallas flight when the plane's left engine exploded sending shrapnel flying into a window next to her seat.
The banking executive was left hanging half outside the shattered window as fellow passengers desperately scrambled to drag her back inside the aircraft, which was carrying 149 people.
She was rushed to the hospital immediately after hero pilot Tammie Jo Shults took the plane into a sharp descent and made an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport at 11.27am. Authorities confirm that she later died while seven other people were injured.
Shults, a former Navy fighter pilot and one of the first women to fly an F-18, quickly brought Flight 1380 to land having calmly told Air Traffic Control: 'So we have a part of the aircraft missing.'
Asked if the plane was on fire, she said: 'No, it's not on fire but part of it's missing. They said there is a hole and someone went out.' She added that 'we have injured passengers' as she requested medical staff to meet them on landing. Passengers say that after landing the plane, the pilot took the time to speak to all those aboard personally.
Those on board said they heard a loud 'boom' and the Boeing 737-700 immediately dropped, they said, by what felt like 100ft. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and passengers said their prayers and braced for impact.
The National Transportation Safety Board has said a preliminary examination of the blown jet engine shows evidence of 'metal fatigue.'
