A Boeing 737-800 from the Australian airline Qantas made an emergency landing on Friday due to a “contained engine failure” shortly after taking off from Sydney Airport, setting fire to the grass of a neighboring runway, announced the air carrier.
Flight QF520 was to transport its passengers from Sydney to Brisbane. But the plane was forced to turn around for an emergency landing after circling in the air “for a short period of time”, said the airline’s chief pilot, Richard Tobiano.
“Qantas engineers have carried out a preliminary inspection of the engine and have confirmed that this is a contained engine failure,” the airline said in a statement on its website.
“Although customers heard a loud bang, there was no explosion,” she said.
The air regulator Airservices Australia, for its part, explained in a press release that the engine failure had triggered “a fire in a grass area adjacent to the runway”, which was immediately extinguished by firefighters.
The runway affected by this brief fire was closed and should be operational again Friday evening, according to the same source, which specified that the incident had not caused any injuries.
“We will conduct an investigation to determine the cause of the engine problem,” added Mr. Tobiano.
Georgina Lewis, who was on board the plane, claims to have heard a “boom”.
“One of the engines seemed to have failed. The pilot arrived 10 minutes later to explain that there had been a problem with the right engine on takeoff,” she told local television channel Channel Nine.
Another passenger, Mark Willacy, a journalist for national broadcaster ABC, said the plane struggled to take off after a “loud boom”.
“That big boom as the wheels came off the ground and the shaking, I’ve never felt anything like that,” he told ABC.
Eleven domestic flights were canceled and four others were diverted to other airports, a Sydney Airport spokesperson said.
