The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that bird remains were found in the engine of a Ryanair Boeing 737 NG. It concerns the flight from Thessaloniki to Memmingen in Germany, when part of the engine separated, broke a cabin window and the aircraft lost pressure.

At that moment Ljubiša Karović, 61, began sliding out through the opening head first. His wife Svetlana Grković grabbed him by the legs, and two other passengers helped her pull him back inside. The plane was forced to land.

Four bird strikes in twelve months

What makes the report uncomfortable is not the bird itself. According to the preliminary finding of 10 July, the crew reported four suspected bird strikes on the same aircraft over the preceding twelve months. In two cases remains were reportedly found, but subsequent maintenance confirmed no damage. The CFM engine was inspected in May - no irregularities established.

So: four reports, two findings of remains, zero confirmed damage, and three months later part of the engine separates in mid-air. Somewhere in that sequence somebody concluded there was nothing to fix.

The silence of the companies

Boeing and Ryanair declined to comment. GE and Safran, the engine manufacturers, were unavailable. The head of the US Federal Aviation Administration said early indicators do not suggest the Ryanair problem resembles the 2018 Southwest incident - a formulation that reassures and asserts nothing at the same time.

Why this story concerns us directly

Thessaloniki is not a distant airport. It is the exit point towards Europe for a large part of the region - a flight you drive two and a half hours from Skopje to reach instead of paying for an expensive connection through another hub. The passenger is Serbian, the flight departed from Greece, and the aircraft belongs to a low-cost airline that the whole region uses because it is the cheapest.

There is no basis for claiming that flying has become unsafe - the statistics say the opposite. But there is a basis for asking what „inspected, no irregularities established” means when the same engine comes apart over the Aegean three months later. And who will give that answer, if everyone who knows it declines to comment.