News has just been reported that budget airline Ryanair had been told it needed to reinforce an engine part that may have been involved in the high profile event that saw a customer injured as they were sucked into a window space when it blew out of the plane. The regulator that ordered airlines to reinforce the part gave them until 2028 to do it, a decade after the fatal accident that prompted the rule.
And in breaking news, a US safety investigation into the flight that lost cabin pressure over northern Greece last month has turned up a n important detail - the same engine had four suspected bird strikes logged against it in the year before it failed.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was asked to lead the probe under international rules after Greece's own investigators handed it over. Its preliminary findings, published this week explain why a routine take off from Greece’s second city Thessaloniki turned into an emergency landing.
At a glance
The Malta Air-operated Boeing 737-800, flying on behalf of Ryanair, had barely cleared 16,000 feet on its way to Memmingen in Germany on 10 July when the flight crew picked up a high-vibration warning on the right-hand engine. They throttled back, ran the standard checks, and when the shaking eased, continued the climb on autopilot.
It didn't last. The vibrations returned, then intensified, and the crew heard what the report describes as a loud bang before the autopilot disconnected. A fan blade in the number two engine had snapped near its root, and the debris tore through the fuselage and struck the horizontal stabiliser. One fragment shattered a cabin window in row 11, and the passenger seated beside it, a 61-year-old Serbian national, was partially pulled through the opening before others managed to haul him back inside. The aircraft returned to Thessaloniki and landed without further incident.
Investigators later recovered bird remains, including feathers, from several points inside the damaged engine. That's significant, because the same aircraft had logged four suspected bird strikes to that engine in the preceding twelve months, with remains confirmed after two of them. None of the follow-up checks turned anything up. The blades had also passed ultrasonic inspections in November 2025 and again in May this year, just weeks before the failure.
The risk here was already known before this flight took off. The US Federal Aviation Administration issued three separate airworthiness directives requiring operators to reinforce engine casing components on this generation of Boeing 737, following two earlier fan-blade failures in 2016 and the fatal 2018 Southwest Airlines incident in which a passenger died after being partially pulled out of a window. Airlines, including Ryanair, have until 2028 to complete the retrofits: a full decade after the Southwest accident that prompted the rule, and still two years away at the time this engine failed. The NTSB has not said whether earlier compliance would have changed the outcome here, but the gap between a directive being issued and a fleet-wide fix being mandatory is the kind of latent exposure underwriters should be pricing for now, not after a final report closes the file.
Ryanair's chief executive, Michael O'Leary, told investors soon after the incident that early findings pointed to "foreign object damage" rather than the aircraft's age or maintenance history. The NTSB pushed back publicly, with chair Jennifer Homendy writing that investigators had not ruled out age or servicing issues and warning that his comments risked breaching the disclosure rules that bind parties to an active investigation. Public statements made mid-investigation can create their own reputational and crisis-response exposure, quite separate from the underlying claim, and airline risk managers should take note.
Aviation claims costs have been climbing steadily, and engine-related losses are a big part of that story. McLarens Aviation's most recent claims cost index put fan blade repair costs up 7.5% year on year, with major repairs, OEM costs and MRO facility charges rising even faster. Add rising liability awards, an ageing narrow-body fleet still working through years-old FAA directives, and heavier scrutiny of US-exposed carriers, and you get the conditions Gallagher flagged for 2026: continued technical rate pressure even as capacity keeps softening headline pricing.
A separate, unrelated CFM56-7B fan blade inspection rule was published in the Federal Register just weeks after this accident. The filing names the Ryanair flight directly, but the FAA is explicit that it has "received no factual information" tying the incident to that particular unsafe condition. Not every regulatory document that mentions an accident is evidence of its cause, and more paperwork on this one is likely to surface over the coming months.
No public figure exists yet for what this specific incident might cost insurers, and it would be wrong to guess one. For scale, Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty has previously put the average cost of a runway-related liability claim alone at roughly $1.9 million, though that figure is a few years old and isn't specific to fan-blade losses. It also excludes serious bodily injury, uncontained engine failure, and reputational fallout from a chief executive's public comments during an active investigation. Multi-passenger bodily injury exposure, in particular, can rise from five figures to seven very quickly once litigation starts.
There's a product liability angle too: engine manufacturer CFM International and Boeing are both assisting the investigation, and any finding that links the failure to a design, manufacturing or inspection shortfall, rather than a fresh bird strike, would sit squarely in aerospace manufacturers' and component suppliers' product liability towers. It's a cover brokers are already fielding more questions about, as this guide to aviation and aerospace manufacturers insurance sets out.
Passenger liability sublimits deserve another look given how quickly a single serious bodily injury claim can escalate. So does the interplay between hull, liability and any product recall or grounding cover tied to outstanding airworthiness directives. Commercial airline insurance in the UK is a legal requirement before an aircraft can even be registered, but the minimum won't always be the right number, particularly for operators still years away from completing FAA-mandated retrofits.
The final NTSB report should clarify whether the bird strikes, the blade fatigue, or some combination of both was ultimately responsible.
The injured passenger was left seriously hurt and in shock, according to his wife. Ryanair has said it will not comment further until the NTSB's investigation concludes.
