ORLANDO, Fla. – The NTSB said it is examining the Southwest Airlines jet that made an emergency landing Saturday and the engine that caused it.
Terry Williams, NTSB public affairs officer in Washington, D.C., told News 6 he expects to release preliminary findings later this week but that no cause or analysis will be included in the report.
The plane, scheduled to fly from New Orleans to Orlando, landed safely in Pensacola.
"Engine fire. Severe damage. Separation," the pilot of flight 3472 told air traffic controllers. "High airplane vibration occurred and continued after the engine was shut down."
Southwest has said there was no fire but several passengers reported hearing an explosion followed by a sudden drop in altitude.
Pictures taken by passengers show the front end of the engine missing and appeared to be torn off. Pictures also show a gouge in the side of the plane below the windows and damage to the tail.
"Right now it's really too early to tell [what happened]," said Professor Anthony Brickhouse of Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. "As air safety investigators, we're trained to keep everything on the table unless the air safety investigation suggests otherwise."
Brickhouse is a former NTSB employee and currently the air safety investigator at Embry Riddle. He explained what the NTSB meant when it classified the emergency as an "uncontained engine failure."
"When that engine is designed, it's designed to contain all of those parts," said Brickhouse. "So sometimes in a high-energy situation or a failure situation those parts can be ejected from the engine. And in some cases it can puncture the fuselage which can cause major issues."
"When an engine comes apart and ejects through that container you mentioned, this could be disastrous?" asked News 6 anchor Erik von Ancken.
"We had a major disaster back in Sioux City, Iowa in the 1980s where the engine came apart and literally took out the hydraulic system in the aircraft and deemed the aircraft uncontrollable," said Brickhouse. "We had another situation with an aircraft, I believe it was in Pensacola, where the engine had a failure and shrapnel went through the fuselage and fatally injured somebody. It's rare that this happens but when it does it's a very serious situation."
A woman who was on the Southwest plane with her husband and three children told CNN affiliate KOCO that the engine was right outside her window.
"It was just a big explosion. There was some smoke and then nothing," she told the Oklahoma City station. "I saw parts flapping in the wind."
The plane started shaking and breathing masks were deployed as the airliner descended.
Some people started screaming and crying, the woman said.
None of the 99 passengers or five crew members were hurt, Southwest said.
"(The crew) stayed professional. They were amazing," the woman, who was not identified, told KOCO. "I mean, we couldn't have had a better crew, and it was thanks to that pilot that we're all alive."
The woman said that once the plane seemed to stabilize, one of the pilots came into the cabin and told the passengers that the engine was lost.
According to the FAA, the airliner involved is a Boeing 737, which has two turbofan engines, one on each wing.
Williams said the NTSB is not examining any of the other 737s in the Southwest fleet.