Jennifer Riordan, 43, a mother-of-two from Albuquerque, was returning from a business trip aboard the New York to Dallas flight when the plane's left engine exploded sending shrapnel flying into a window next to her seat.
The banking executive was left hanging half outside the shattered window as fellow passengers desperately scrambled to drag her back inside the aircraft, which was carrying 149 people.
She was rushed to hospital immediately after hero pilot Tammie Jo Shults took the plane into a sharp descent and made an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport at 11.27am. Authorities confirm that she later died while seven other people were injured.
Shults, a former Navy fighter pilot and one of the first women to fly an F-18, quickly brought Flight 1380 to land having calmly told Air Traffic Control: 'So we have a part of the aircraft missing.'
Asked if the plane was on fire, she said: 'No, it's not on fire but part of it's missing. They said there is a hole and someone went out.' She added that 'we have injured passengers' as she requested medical staff to meet them on landing. Passengers say that after landing the plane, the pilot took the time to speak to all those aboard personally.
Those on board said they heard a loud 'boom' and the Boeing 737-700 immediately dropped, they said, by what felt like 100ft. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and passengers said their prayers and braced for impact.
The National Transportation Safety Board has said a preliminary examination of the blown jet engine shows evidence of 'metal fatigue.'
Riordan was sitting next to the smashed window and others next to her described holding her down for 12 minutes until the plane landed.
Passenger Alfred Tumlinson, of Corpus Christi, Texas, said he saw a man in a cowboy hat rush forward a few rows 'to grab that lady to pull her back in. She was out of the plane. He couldn't do it by himself, so another gentleman came over and helped to get her back in the plane, and they got her'.
Another passenger, Eric Zilbert, an administrator with the California Education Department, said: 'From her waist above, she was outside of the plane.'
Passengers struggled to somehow plug the hole while giving the badly injured woman CPR.
Those on board did 'some pretty amazing things under some pretty difficult circumstances', Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel said.
Amanda Bourman, of New York, said she was asleep near the back when she heard a loud noise and oxygen masks dropped.
'Everybody was crying and upset,' she said. 'You had a few passengers that were very strong, and they kept yelling to people, you know, 'It's OK! We're going to do this!''
'I just remember holding my husband's hand, and we just prayed and prayed and prayed. And the thoughts that were going through my head of course were about my daughters, just wanting to see them again and give them a big hug so they wouldn't grow up without parents.'
Annunciation Catholic School, where her two children attend school, identified Riordan as the victim on Tuesday afternoon.
'She was en route from New York when her plane experience (sic) trouble,' assistant principal Amy McCarty wrote in an email to parents, according to ABQJournal 'At this point, the family needs all the prayers we can offer.'
Riordan, the wife of former City of Albuquerque Chief Operations Officer Michael, was the vice president of community relations for Wells Fargo bank, New Mexico, and had been on a business trip for the bank at the time of the explosion.
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