NTSB Takes Over Investigation Into Ryanair Window Blowout That Nearly Sucked Passenger Out Mid-Flight

What happened

A Ryanair flight operated by Malta Air took off from Thessaloniki, Greece, on July 10, headed for Memmingen near Munich. Minutes after takeoff, a window dislodged, the cabin lost pressure, and a 61-year-old male passenger was partially pulled out of the opening before fellow passengers grabbed him and held on, according to the National Transportation Safety Board and reporting from the San Mateo Daily Journal, CoastTV, and The National Herald.

The man suffered neck and shoulder injuries along with friction burns, according to a Greek hospital official cited in those reports. It wasn't immediately clear as of Thursday, July 16, whether he remained hospitalized.

Passengers told Greek media they heard a loud bang, oxygen masks dropped, and the plane started losing altitude. Video shared by Radio Thessaloniki showed passengers wearing oxygen masks, the blown-out window, and first responders working the aisle after landing.

Flight-tracking data shows the Boeing 737-800, delivered new to Ryanair back in 2008, had climbed past 15,000 feet about six minutes after departure before dropping fast to roughly 6,000 feet, according to Flightradar24 data cited by the same outlets. The plane made an emergency landing back at Thessaloniki.

Who's running the investigation now

Greece's Hellenic Air and Rail Safety Investigation Authority initially had jurisdiction. Under international aviation rules, Greece can hand lead investigator status to another country's authority, and it did—to the NTSB, which announced Thursday it accepted the role with Greece now participating rather than leading.

The NTSB also corrected an earlier read on the flight path. Investigators first believed the incident happened over the Republic of North Macedonia. A closer look at the data put it squarely in Greek airspace instead, according to the NTSB.

The engine question nobody's fully answered

The NTSB said it was told the flight turned back because of "a right engine issue and cabin decompression," not just a busted window. That's two separate problems, potentially linked.

Ryanair, for its part, has stuck to its original line: that the flight returned to Thessaloniki after a window became dislodged. When asked directly by reporters about the engine issue the NTSB flagged, the airline didn't address it and just repeated the window statement, according to the San Mateo Daily Journal, CoastTV, and The National Herald.

Either the engine issue is unrelated noise, or it's connected to why the window came loose in the first place. Ryanair hasn't said which, at least not publicly as of this week.

The New York Post's coverage adds a detail the other outlets didn't lead with: video and FAA information indicate a piece of engine broke off the 737 and smashed into the window shortly after takeoff. If that sequence holds up, it would explain both the "engine issue" and the decompression as one connected event, not two coincidences.

Echoes of Southwest, but investigators say slow down

The obvious comparison is to two prior Southwest Airlines 737 NG incidents, in 2016 and 2018. In the 2018 case, a passenger died after being partially sucked out of a window damaged by a broken fan blade. That led the NTSB to push Boeing to redesign the fan cowl structure on 737 NG jets, and the FAA issued an airworthiness directive in 2023 requiring fixes by 2028.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told Reuters he doesn't think early indications point to a repeat of the Southwest scenario. Engine failures have plenty of different root causes, and jumping to "this is the same problem as 2018" before the physical evidence is examined would be getting ahead of the facts. The NTSB hasn't published findings tying this incident to fan blade failure or cowl design.

What a former pilot says about the physics

Shye Gilad, a former airline captain who teaches at Georgetown University's business school, told reporters that a window blowing out causes rapid decompression, a sudden pressure loss that creates a brief but powerful suction near the opening before things stabilize. He said seatbelts make a real difference in those first seconds and that events like this are "very rare" because "it takes a lot to breach a cabin."

Modern airliners are engineered with redundancy specifically because catastrophic cabin breaches are supposed to be extraordinarily unlikely. When one happens anyway on a plane that's 18 years old, it raises legitimate maintenance and structural questions that a seatbelt reminder doesn't fully answer.

What's next

The NTSB investigation is active, with Greek authorities participating. No findings, cause determination, or fault assignment has been announced. Whether the engine issue caused the window failure, whether the aircraft's age or maintenance history played a role, and whether this triggers another FAA directive similar to the 2023 cowl-structure order are all open questions the investigation still has to answer.