Southwest Airlines plane makes emergency landing after window cracks mid-flight

Incident follows two weeks after another of the firm's jets suffered an engine blowout, killing one passenger

There were no reports of injuries after Flight 957 landed safely at Cleveland's Hopkins International Airport (Twitter/Chaikel)

A Southwest Airlines plane was forced to make an emergency landing after a window cracked mid-flight.

The airline said no one was injured in the incident with the crack affecting one of multiple layers of the window pane.

It followed two weeks after another Southwest jet made an emergency landing when an engine blowout caused shrapnel to puncture a window, causing a passenger to become partially sucked out of the plane.

There were no reports of injuries after Wednesday's Flight 957, flying from Chicago to New Jersey, landed safely at Cleveland's Hopkins International Airport.

"The flight landed uneventfully in Cleveland. The aircraft has been taken out of service, and our local Cleveland employees are working diligently to accommodate the 76 customers on a new aircraft to Newark," the airline said in a statement.

Passengers said the emergency exit window shattered and pictures showed damage to the pane.

A spokeswoman for Southwest said the aircraft never lost cabin pressure.

She added that the pilots did not declare an emergency before landing and there were no other mechanical problems with the plane.

A passenger who died after being partially sucked out of a Southwest jet window in April was the airline's first fatality, knocking the Dallas-based firm from its position as the safest airline in the world by passengers flown.

She was named as Jennifer Riordan, a 43-year-old mother-of-two.

The banking executive was travelling home to her family following a business trip when she was hit by shrapnel after the Boeing 737 blew an engine at 32,000ft on a flight from New York to Dallas.