A fan blade snapped off inside the right engine of a Ryanair jet last month, and the broken pieces tore straight through the side of the plane. One chunk smashed a window right next to seat 11F. The man sitting there, 61-year-old Ljubisa Karovic, had his head and shoulders pulled out through the hole before his wife and a flight attendant grabbed him and hauled him back inside.
That is the account U.S. investigators laid out in a preliminary report on Thursday, about a month after the July 10 flight. The National Transportation Safety Board took the lead after Greek authorities handed the case over, and the details it published paint a much darker picture than the airline first described. Ryanair had called it a flight that simply “returned to Thessaloniki shortly after takeoff when a passenger window dislodged in-flight.” The report tells a different story.
The seven and a half minutes that went wrong
The Boeing 737 lifted off from Thessaloniki in northern Greece, headed for Memmingen, Germany. Seven and a half minutes into the climb, the cockpit got a warning about high vibrations in the right engine. Nearly two minutes after that, the shaking got much worse. The pilots heard a loud bang, and the autopilot switched itself off. The plane was cruising at roughly 16,000 feet when the window blew out.
Flight records show the jet had climbed past 15,000 feet about six minutes after departure, then dropped fast to around 6,000 feet. It circled there for about 30 minutes to burn off fuel before it was light enough for an emergency landing. All told, the plane touched back down in Thessaloniki roughly an hour after it left. Less than ten minutes of that hour was normal flying.
The passenger in seat 11F
Karovic’s wife told Reuters what happened in the seconds after the window shattered. Her husband’s head and shoulders were sucked out into open air at thousands of feet. She and a flight attendant reached over and physically pulled him back into the cabin. Without those two people, this is a very different news story.
He did not walk away clean. Karovic suffered neck and shoulder injuries plus friction burns from being dragged against the torn edge of the fuselage. Crew members moved him back to row 12, where a doctor who happened to be on the flight looked after him. He was one of the passengers who requested medical help after the plane landed.
A metal box against a hole in the fuselage
With a gaping hole in the side of the plane and the cabin losing pressure, the passengers improvised. Some of them grabbed a metal box from the flight attendants and used it to try to plug the opening until the jet could get down. The oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, and people sat there breathing through them while the plane descended.
Short videos filmed inside the cabin and shared by Radio Thessaloniki show rows of passengers in oxygen masks, one clip appears to show the broken window with a man sitting right beside it, and a third, apparently shot after landing, shows first responders working in the aisle. Flight attendants told investigators they heard and felt a loud, continuous vibration and saw smoke or fog inside the cabin right before the masks came down.
An 18-year-old jet and an engine that passed inspection
The aircraft was a Boeing 737-800 that can seat up to 189 people. According to flight-tracking site Flightradar24, it was delivered new to Ryanair back in 2008, which made it 18 years old at the time of the accident. The engine that came apart was a CFM International CFM56-7B26, one of the most common engines in the sky.
The age matters because of what maintenance records showed. The fan blades on that right engine had gone through ultrasonic inspections twice, once in May 2026 and again in November 2025, and neither one turned up any damage. Yet the NTSB report pointed to fatigue cracking as part of what happened. A blade that broke from metal fatigue managed to slip past two recent checks, which is exactly the kind of question investigators will chase down.
The bird problem
The engine also had a history with birds. The NTSB said flight crews had reported four suspected bird strikes to that same right engine over the past year. Bird remains were confirmed after two of those events. And after this July accident, investigators once again found bird remains inside the engine, which suggests the plane may have hit birds during takeoff.
Even with that, the board has not connected the dots to a cause. Investigators say they have not figured out what actually made the fan blade break loose. Birds in the engine, fatigue cracking in the metal, an 18-year-old airframe: all of it is on the table, and none of it has been ruled in or out.
What the CEO said versus what the report says
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary got out ahead of this one, and the NTSB was not happy about it. On a July earnings call, he told investors the investigation was zeroed in on foreign object damage, not the plane’s age or its maintenance history. He also flatly told them, “Nobody was out any window.”
The preliminary report says otherwise. It describes a passenger “partially lodged in a damaged cabin window” and states that “other passengers managed to pull the injured passenger back into the cabin.” That directly contradicts the man running the airline. The NTSB reprimanded O’Leary, saying investigators had not ruled anything out and that he was not authorized to discuss the case. Ryanair, for the record, is Europe’s largest budget carrier, and this particular flight was operated by its subsidiary Malta Air.
Where the investigation stands now
This report is only preliminary, so it lays out facts without naming a final cause. That answer usually takes a year or more. Under international aviation rules, Greece’s Hellenic Air and Rail Safety Investigation Authority asked the NTSB to run the inquiry, and Greece is staying involved as an “accredited representative.” The Associated Press sent requests for comment to Ryanair, Boeing, and CFM International.
For everyone on board, the ending could have been much worse. The plane landed normally, and the passengers were able to walk back into the terminal. A broken fan blade sent metal ripping through the cabin at 16,000 feet, a man’s head was pulled outside the aircraft, and the people around him pulled him back in. Now the job for investigators is to explain how a routine short hop over Greece nearly turned into something no maintenance log predicted.
