A broken fan blade sent engine debris ripping through the fuselage of a Ryanair Boeing 737, shattering a passenger window and partially ejecting a 61-year-old man, and investigators now say a bird strike may have triggered the catastrophic failure.
The National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary report on the July 10 incident aboard Ryanair Flight 1879, detailing how fragments from the plane's No. 2 engine sliced into the fuselage at multiple points, destroyed a window in row 11, and caused rapid cabin depressurization minutes after takeoff from Thessaloniki, Greece. The flight, bound for Memmingen, Germany, carried 149 passengers and six crew members. Only one person, the Serbian man seated in 11F, was injured, and his injuries were serious.
Bird remains, including feathers, were found inside the failed engine. But investigators have not yet determined whether those remains came from the July 10 flight or from one of four prior bird strikes the same aircraft experienced in the previous twelve months. The samples have been sent to the Smithsonian Institution Feather Identification Lab in Washington, D.C., for examination, CBS News reported.
The NTSB report paints a grim sequence. Pilots received a warning about the No. 2 engine shortly after takeoff, then heard a loud bang. One of the engine's fan blades broke off. Debris exited the engine casing and punctured the fuselage in several locations. The window at seat 11F was destroyed, and pieces of shattered glass scattered across multiple rows.
Three loose fan blade fragments were recovered from the engine. Investigators found signs of metal fatigue at the base of the broken blade, a finding that raises hard questions, because the engine's fan blades had undergone ultrasonic inspections in both November 2025 and May 2026, AP News reported. Neither inspection turned up damage.
Data recorders showed that vibrations on the No. 2 engine ran higher than those on the No. 1 engine during the final phase of takeoff. Whether that vibration spike was linked to the bird strike, the fatigue crack, or both remains an open question for investigators.
The NTSB report also noted that engine updates required by the Federal Aviation Administration for U.S. airlines, with a compliance deadline of 2028, had not been completed on this aircraft. Ryanair, an Irish carrier, is not subject to FAA regulations. Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and FAA investigator, told AP News that the risk had been judged manageable enough to allow a longer timeline for compliance.
But Guzzetti added a pointed caveat, as reported by AP:
"It takes time to do the maintenance, to get the parts, and the risk at the time was assessed such that the industry could probably wait that long. Now with this event, that may change things."
A flight attendant told NTSB investigators that after the cabin depressurized and oxygen masks deployed, the passenger in seat 11F was "partially lodged in a damaged cabin window, and that the entire window was missing." Fellow passengers pulled him back into the cabin.
The man was moved to row 12, where a fellow passenger who happened to be a doctor treated him. Another passenger went to the forward galley, retrieved a metal box, and tried to use it to block the gaping hole where the window had been. The aircraft immediately returned to Thessaloniki International Airport. No one else aboard was hurt.
The injured man, later identified as Ljubisa Karovic, a 61-year-old Serbian national, described the ordeal to The Guardian. His wife, Svetlana Maksimović, told the New York Post that her husband fainted three times during the roughly two-minute ordeal and sustained severe burns after being thrust waist-up out of the aircraft at nearly 350 miles per hour.
Karovic himself offered a spare summary of his survival:
"I don't remember much and my head and neck still hurt but I am still alive."
He credited one thing above all: "It could have been the seatbelt, the fact that I was still strapped in."
One of the most troubling details in the NTSB's preliminary findings involves the plane's recent history. The Boeing 737 involved in Flight 1879 had been the subject of four reported bird strikes in the twelve months leading up to July 10. Bird remains were confirmed in two of those four cases. The aircraft reportedly returned to an airport the day before the near-fatal incident, adding another layer of scrutiny to the plane's operational history.
Investigators have flagged a specific uncertainty: the bird remains found deep inside the engine after the July 10 failure may not be from that flight at all. They could be residual material from a prior strike. That distinction matters. If the remains predate the incident, the question shifts from what caused the blade to break to why accumulated evidence of bird damage did not prompt more aggressive maintenance.
Guzzetti, the aviation risk expert, told the New York Post that the NTSB's involvement was a positive sign. Greek authorities delegated the American agency as the lead investigator, a decision that puts the probe in the hands of the world's most experienced aviation accident investigators.
"We still don't know why this particular event happened. It's an extremely rare occurrence, but the Greeks have asked the US NTSB to investigate, so that's a good thing because they have experience in investigating similar cases in the past."
Boeing issued a brief statement to CBS News saying the company "continues to support the investigation led by" the NTSB. The full statement leaned heavily on procedural language:
"Consistent with NTSB requirements and International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Annex 13 protocols, Boeing defers to the NTSB. We remain in contact and continue to work with our customers Ryanair and Malta Air."
Ryanair said it would not comment until the NTSB investigation concludes. That final report is expected within twelve to twenty-four months.
The incident is not the only recent Boeing 737 emergency to raise safety questions. An American Airlines 737 was forced back to Myrtle Beach after a bird strike sent flames shooting from an engine, and a separate United Airlines 737 blew a tire on takeoff at O'Hare, forcing 167 people onto the runway. Each incident adds weight to the broader conversation about whether the pace of mandated safety upgrades matches the scale of the risk.
The NTSB's preliminary report establishes the basic facts: a fan blade with a fatigue crack snapped, engine debris breached the fuselage, a window blew out, and a man nearly died. What the report does not yet answer is whether the bird strike caused the blade to fail, whether the fatigue crack would have held without the strike, and whether four prior bird strikes on the same aircraft should have triggered a different maintenance response.
Ljubisa Karovic survived because he wore his seatbelt and because strangers on a budget flight pulled him back through a hole in the side of the airplane. The system that was supposed to prevent that moment from ever happening, inspections, maintenance protocols, regulatory timelines, failed him first.
