A Qantas plane made an emergency landing on Friday due to what the airline called a “confined engine failure” shortly after takeoff from Sydney Airport, sparking a grass fire on a nearby runway and causing the diversion of several flights.
The Qantas flight, QF520, was bound for Brisbane and hovered for “a short period” before landing safely at Sydney Airport, Qantas Chief Pilot Captain Richard Tobiano said in the statement .
There is no word yet on how many people are on board.
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“Qantas engineers have carried out a preliminary inspection of the engine and have confirmed that this is a contained engine failure,” the airline said. “While customers would have heard a loud bang, there was no explosion.”
The Reuters news agency explains that during a contained engine failure, the engine parts remain inside the protective casing intended to prevent them from flying away. If they did, they could cause serious damage to the main body of an aircraft.
Airservices Australia, the government’s aviation regulator, said the engine failure caused “a fire in a grassy area adjacent to the runway”, which was quickly extinguished by firefighters.
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Airservices’ National Operations Management Center made a 47-minute ground stop at Sydney Airport to ensure the plane could land as quickly as possible, the regulator said in a statement, adding that no one was injured.
Reuters reports that the airport said all of its runways had reopened Friday afternoon after the parallel runway was closed for inspection due to the fire.
The plane is a 19-year-old Boeing 737-800, Reuters said, citing Flightradar24. This type of twin-engine airliner is designed to be able to fly using a single engine in an emergency, Reuters noted.
Passenger Georgina Lewis said she heard a “bang”.
“One of the engines appeared to have failed. The pilot arrived 10 minutes later to explain that he had had a problem with a right engine on takeoff,” she told local broadcaster Channel Nine.
Another passenger, Mark Willacy, a journalist with the Australian national broadcaster ABC, said the plane had difficulty taking off following the sound of the “loud bang”.
“That big bang as the wheels left the ground and that thrill was like nothing I’d ever felt,” he told ABC. “When we landed, there was a lot of applause and cheering among the passengers.”
Tobiano said his staff members are “highly trained” to respond to such emergency situations.
“We understand that this would have been a distressing experience for customers and we will be contacting all customers this afternoon to provide our support,” he said in the statement. “We will also investigate the cause of the engine problem.”
Customers were being transferred to alternative flights, Qantas said.
Eleven domestic flights were canceled and four diverted to other airports, a Sydney Airport spokesperson said.
