riordan, didn't survive. >> everybody was yelling and screaming. >> reporter: the first officer also spoke about the incident. >> that'sing through about 32,000 feet when we had a large bang and a rapid decompression. there was shaking, everything. and it happened all at once. >> reporter: shults said she and her first officer used hand signals to communicate in the cockpit because of the noise level. >> it was loud, and it was just hard to communicate for a lot of different reasons. >> reporter: and almost immediately the national transportation safety board determined that metal fatigue was a key factor that caused that fan blade to detach setting off this chain of events. southwest airlines in the middle of performing these faa-required ultrasonic inspections on the engines similar to the one with the failure a month ago here.