The aircraft was operating Southwest Airlines' domestic scheduled service from Phoenix, Arizona, to Sacramento, California.

[2][3][4][5] The NTSB investigation revealed evidence of pre-existing metal fatigue, and determined the probable cause of the incident to be related to an error in the manufacturing process for joining fuselage crown skin panels.

[2] The incident was the second of this type in less than two years, following the structural failure of Southwest Airlines Flight 2294 in 2009, and led to the FAA increasing the inspection rate of certain airframes.

[3] At this point the flight attendants began relaying reports to the pilots of an injury and a "two-foot hole" in the fuselage.

[8][9] The flight attendant had been attempting to make an interphone call to the pilots or a PA announcement to the passengers, instead of immediately donning his oxygen mask as he had been trained.

An off-duty airline employee rushing to assist the flight attendant also lost consciousness, fell, and received a cut to the head.

[2] A spare aircraft with maintenance technicians, ground crew, and customer service agents was dispatched from Phoenix to take the passengers to Sacramento.

The area of fuselage crown skin that would fail in this incident was at the site of the split manufacturing process, where work was partially performed in Wichita and finished in Renton.

[2] Inspection of the aircraft at Yuma revealed a section of fuselage skin had fractured and flapped open, causing the rapid decompression.

[16] On April 5, 2011, the FAA issued an emergency airworthiness directive (AD) requiring operators of 737 series 300, 400 and 500 aircraft to increase the frequency of inspections of lap joints on high flight cycle airframes.

[18] Of the total of 580 aircraft, only 175 met the 30,000 cycle requirement at the time of the AD issuance, with 80 of those operating in the United States.

[20] As a result of the incident, the FAA investigated Boeing's manufacturing techniques to discover whether or not they had any bearing on the cause of the failure.

[12] The events of the incident were documented in a series two episode of Aircrash Confidential titled "Maintenance Failure".