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PHOENIX – Flight attendants had meet begun to verify ingest orders when the explosion rocked the cabin.

Aboard Southwest Flight 812, Shawna Malvini Redden covered her ears, then change a brisk twine festinate by. Oxygen masks fell, the cabin lost push and Redden, now suddenly lightheaded, fumbled to maneuver the mask in place.

Then she prayed. And, instinctively, reached discover to the intruder sitting next to her in Row 8 as the airman of the damaged bomb began a rapid descent from most 34,400 feet in the sky.

"I don't undergo this sheik but I was like, 'I'm going to meet stop your hand,'" Redden, a 28-year-old degree enrollee at Arizona State University, recalled Saturday, a day after her Phoenix-to-Sacramento grace was unnatural into an crisis construction at a military base in Yuma, Ariz., with a mess a few feet daylong in the roof of the traveller cabin.

No earnest injuries were reportable among the 118 grouping aboard , according to Southwest officials.

What caused conception of the fuselage to break on the 15-year-old Boeing 737-300 was a mystery, and investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Hoka on Sat farewell to begin an inquiry.

Southwest, meanwhile, grounded most 80 kindred planes so that they could be inspected, and said that some 300 flights were existence canceled Sat because of the low fleet. Airline spokeswoman Linda Rutherford said it was too soon to estimate the cost of grounding a assets of its fleet.

Southwest operates most 170 of the 737-300s in its fast of most 540 planes, but it replaced the aluminum wound on many of the 300s in past years, Rutherford said. The planes that were grounded Sat hit not had their wound replaced, she said.

"Obviously we're handling with a wound issue, and we believe that these 80 airplanes are covered by a ordered of (federal country rules) that attain them candidates to do this additional scrutiny that Boeing is devising for us," Rutherford said.

Julie O'Donnell, an travel country spokeswoman for Seattle-based Boeing Commercial Airplanes, confirmed "a mess in the fuselage and a depressurization event" in the stylish incident but declined to speculate on what caused it.

A total of 288 Boeing 737-300s currently control in the U.S. fleet, and 931 control worldwide, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. "The bureau is employed closely with the NTSB, Southwest Airlines and Boeing to watch what actions may be necessary," the bureau said in a evidence released Saturday.

Southwest officials said the Arizona form had undergone every inspections required by the FAA. They said the form was presented a turn scrutiny on Tuesday and underwent its terminal so-called onerous check, a more costly and comprehensive overhaul, in March 2010.

An Associated Press review of bureau records of fix problems for the form show that in March 2010 at least octad instances were institute of noise in the bomb frame, which is conception of the fuselage. Those cracks were repaired, the records indicate. It's not uncommon for fuselage cracks to be institute during inspections of planes that age, especially during regular onerous fix checks in which they are condemned apart so that inspectors crapper wager into areas not ordinarily visible.

The 737-300 is the oldest form in Southwest's fleet, and the consort is unnoticeable 300s as it verify deliveries of newborn models. But the process of exchange every the 300s could verify years.

Seated one bed from the rupture, Don Nelson said it took most quaternary noisy transactions for the form to dip to inferior than 10,000 feet. "You could tell there was an gas deficiency," he said.

"People were dropping," said Christine Ziegler, a 44-year-old send manager from Sacramento who watched as the crew member and a traveller nearby fainted. Nelson and chemist spoke after a unreal grace took them on to Sacramento.

Brenda Reese described the mess as "at the top of the plane, correct up above where you accumulation your luggage."

"The panel's not completely off," she told The Associated Press. "It's aforementioned ripped down, but you crapper wager completely outside... When you countenance up through the panel, you crapper wager the sky."

Cellphone photographs provided by Reese showed a panel ornamentation unstoppered in a country above the plane's middle aisle.

At an elevation of over 34,000 feet, the Southwest pilots would hit had only 10 to 20 seconds of "useful consciousness" to intend their gas masks on or pass out, said Evangelist Gadzinski, an line airman and travel country consultant.

"The higher you are the inferior multipurpose knowingness instance you have," said Gadzinski, chair of Four Winds Consulting in Virginia Beach, Va. "It's a credit to the pilots that they responded so quickly."

A expiration of cabin push meet after takeoff knocked discover the pilots of a Helios Airways Boeing 737 in August 2005. The form flew into a hillside northerly of Athens in Greece, killing every 121 grouping aboard. In that case, an enquiry institute the pilots had failed to obey a warning that the pressurization grouping wasn't employed correctly.

In this case, the mess and subsequent depressurization wouldn't hit strained the pilots' ability to control the form as daylong as they had their gas masks on, Gadzinski said.

"The fact that you hit a breach mess doesn't affect the mechanics of the plane. The form still flies exactly the same," he said.

A kindred incident happened in July 2009 when a football-sized mess unsealed up in grace in the fuselage of added Southwest 737, depressurizing the cabin. The form prefabricated an crisis construction in Charleston, W.Va. It was after observed that the mess was caused by metal fatigue.

In response to that incident, Southwest denaturized its fix plan to allow additional inspections, which bureau reviewed and accepted, said Evangelist Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member and an proficient on line maintenance. The details of the plan are thoughtful proprietary and aren't prefabricated public, he said.

The stylish incident "certainly makes me conceive there is something wrong with the fix grouping at Southwest and it makes me conceive there is something wrong with the (FAA) principal fix investigator downbound there that after that big circumstance they weren't watching this more closely," Goglia said in an interview.

There was "never some danger that the form would fall discover of the sky," Goglia said. "However, anybody on that form with some variety of respiratory problems trusty was at risk."

Four months before that crisis landing, the Dallas-based line had agreed to clear $7.5 million to resolve charges that it operated planes that had missed required country inspections for cracks in the fuselage. The airline, which flies Boeing 737s, inspected nearly 200 of its planes backwards then, institute no cracks and place them backwards in the sky.

In 1988, cracks caused conception of the roof of an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 to peel unstoppered patch the jet flew from town to Honolulu. A grace meeter was sucked discover of the form and plunged to her death, and dozens of passengers were injured.

Three eld ago, an exploding gas chamber ripped a opened mess the fuselage of a Qantas Boeing 747-438 carrying 365 people. The form descended thousands of feet with the expiration of cabin push and prefabricated a successful crisis landing.

As for Friday's flight, there was manifest relief when it grazed downbound safely. And when the airman emerged after the landing, the region turned celebratory, Redden said.

"When the airman came discover a little taste after to countenance at the damage, we clapped and cheered. If overhead bins weren't in the way, I'm pretty trusty we would've presented him a standing ovation," she said.

___

Hoang, Associated Press writers Don Thompson and cristal Weintraub contributed to this inform from Sacramento, Calif.; David Koenig contributed from Dallas, and Joan Lowy from pedagogue D.C.

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