At approximately 30,000 feet above northern Greece on 10 July, Serbian entrepreneur Ljubisa Karović found himself being pulled through a shattered aircraft window — his head and right arm outside a Ryanair Boeing cruising toward Germany. He was saved only because fellow passengers grabbed hold of him before the pressure differential could finish the job. The 61-year-old later told reporters he was lucky to be alive, recalling that his wife, Svetlana, said he had fainted several times after being dragged back inside the cabin. A preliminary report published by the United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has now identified the mechanical origin of that near-catastrophe.

Shortly after Ryanair flight FR1879 departed Thessaloniki International Airport bound for Memmingen — a regional hub near Munich — the aircraft's number-two right engine suffered what investigators classify as a "fan-blade-out failure." The fractured blade destroyed the adjacent window and damaged the fuselage, causing rapid cabin depressurisation. The two pilots, who had registered high-vibration alerts during the climb, reduced engine power and continued on autopilot; when vibrations surged again and a loud bang was heard, they declared an emergency, donned oxygen masks, and returned to Thessaloniki, where the aircraft landed without further incident. The flight was operated by Malta Air, a Ryanair subsidiary registered in the European Union.

What the NTSB report also surfaces is a troubling maintenance pattern. In the twelve months before the July incident, four separate bird-strike events had been reported against the same engine. Bird remains were confirmed in two of those cases, and the fan blades had undergone ultrasonic inspection — a standard non-destructive testing method — yet the failure still occurred.