Dallas man recalls horror on Southwest Airlines flight

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A Dallas man who took to Facebook Live as his flight made an emergency landing after an engine failed is recalling the horrific ordeal. One person was killed.

Marty Martinez was one of 149 people on board Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 on Tuesday bound from New York to Dallas. When the flight was diverted to Philadelphia after one of its engines failed, Martinez says he bought wi-fi access because he thought he had to say goodbye to his loved ones.

Martinez was only a couple of rows behind where the window was blown out. He says it was several minutes of pure terror.

"About 30 minutes in, I hear this loud boom,” he recalled. “And literally within three to five seconds, all of the oxygen masks were deployed."

Martinez was heading back to his home in Dallas. He says a few seconds after the first boom, he heard a second one.

“This time, it was that window that was about two or three rows catty-corner to me. It just blew, like exploded,” he said. “At this point in a span of about 10 or 12 seconds of the initial explosion, which was the engine, and then the oxygen masks deployed and then that window shattering."

Passengers on board were panicking.

“We were pretty much taking what felt like a nosedive down towards the ground,” Martinez said. “All the while, people were screaming. That woman that was sitting at that seat clearly she just went unconscious. There's no window there. It'll just suck anything out of it. You could see that people were going over to try and plug the hole, other passengers. Things were just flying out, just completely being sucked in the hole."

Martinez says several passengers rushed to help the woman.

"Things just kept getting sucked out. Passengers were holding that woman so that she wouldn't because it was pretty much just a lifeless body,” Martinez said. “I remember looking up and seeing the look on the flight attendant’s face. Just this look of horror. And that's when I knew that we were in really bad shape, like there's no way that this is going to be good."

Martinez says his first thought was getting ahold of loved ones. So he logged onto Facebook and went live.

“That was an incredibly gut-wrenching feeling to have,” he admitted. “To think of as this plane is going down who matters to you most."

Martinez says Southwest Airlines offered him and other passengers a free flight back to Dallas, but he says he's not quite ready to get on a plane just yet. He says he'll return in a couple of days.