A nest camera in a suburb of Denver, Denver, struck the metal object with such force on the ground that it jumped a few feet into the air.
Fortunately, no one was hurt by the falling debris.
Meanwhile, passengers on the flight told their reactions when the incident happened.
David Delucia was sitting back in his plane seat and starting to relax on his way to a long-awaited vacation when a huge explosion and flash of light interrupted an announcement during the flight and put him in survival mode.
The Boeing 777-200, which was en route from Denver to Honolulu on Saturday with 231 passengers and ten crew members on board, had a catastrophic failure in its right-hand car and flames erupted under its wing as the plane began to lose altitude.
While Delucia and his wife were preparing for the worst of times, people in this Denver suburb reacted terribly when large pieces of the hood and fiber fibers rained down on a sports field and on streets and lawns, missing only one house and smashing a truck has. The explosion, visible from the ground, left a trail of black smoke in the air, and small pieces of insulation filled the air like ash.
The plane landed safely at Denver International Airport, and no one on board or on the ground was injured, authorities said. But those in the air and on the ground were deeply shaken.
“When it initially happened, I thought we were done. I thought we were going down,” said Delucia, who stuffed his wallet into his pocket so he could easily identify if the plane would sink. “The pilot did an amazing job. It was quite nerve-wracking.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the plane experienced a right-hand car interruption shortly after takeoff.
The video posted on Twitter shows how the engine was completely engulfed in flames as the plane flew through the air. Freezing frames of various videos taken by a passenger sitting slightly in front of the engine and posted on Twitter apparently displayed a broken fan blade in the engine.
The National Transport Safety Council is investigating. Authorities did not release details as to what could have caused the failure.
United said in a separate statement that most passengers on United Flight 328 were booked with a new flight to Hawaii, but some preferred to stay overnight in a hotel instead.
The Broomfield police station posted photos on Twitter showing large, round pieces of debris that looked like the hood that was leaning against a house in the suburbs, about 40 miles northwest of Denver. Police asked anyone injured on the ground to come forward.
Tyler Thal, who lives in the area, told The Associated Press that he was walking with his family when he noticed a large plane flying extraordinarily low and took out his phone to film it.
‘While I was watching it, I saw an explosion and then the cloud of smoke and some debris fell out. It was just like a stain in the air, and while I was watching it, I told my family what I had just seen and then we heard the explosion, ‘he said in a telephone interview. “The plane went on just like that, and we didn’t see it after that.”
Kirby Klements was inside with his wife when they heard a tremendous booming sound, he said. A few seconds later, the couple sees a massive piece of debris fly past their window and into the bed of Klements’ truck, pushes the cabin and pushes the vehicle into the dirt.
He estimated the cover of the circular engine at 4.5 meters. Fine pieces of the fiberglass insulation used in the aircraft engine fell “like ash” from the air for about ten minutes, and several large pieces of insulation ended up in his backyard.
“If it was 10 feet different, it would have ended up on top of the house,” he said in a telephone interview with the AP. “And if anyone was in the truck, they would have been dead.”
Based on initial photos and videos posted by passengers, air safety experts said the plane apparently had an uncontrolled and catastrophic engine failure.
John Cox, an aviation safety expert and retired aviation pilot, says John Cox, an aviation safety expert and an armored casing around the engine that is extremely rare, is extremely rare and happens when large turning pieces in the engine experience some fault. an aviation safety consulting firm called Safety Operating Systems.
“The unbalanced disk contains a lot of power, and it rotates at a few thousand rotations per minute … and if you have so much centrifugal power, it has to go somewhere,” he said in a telephone interview.
Pilots practice practicing such an event regularly and would have turned off everything flammable in the engine, including fuel and hydraulic fluid, immediately with a single switch, Cox said.
Former NTSB chairman Jim Hall cites the incident as another example of ‘cracks in our culture in air safety (which) need to be addressed’.
Hall, who was on the board from 1994 to 2001, has criticized the FAA over the past decade as an attempt to give manufacturers oversight of aviation that the public paid for. “This is especially true for Boeing,” he said.
The latest death toll on a U.S. airliner was related to such an engine outage on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas in April 2018. A passenger died when the engine broke loose more than 30,000 feet above Pennsylvania and debris hit the plane and broke the window. next to her seat. She was forced halfway through the window before other passengers pulled her back.
In that case, the breakdown was blamed on a broken fan blade in an engine of the Boeing 737. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered airlines to inspect fan blades on certain engines operated by CFM International, a joint venture of General Electric and France , done, to sharpen. Safran SA
In 2010, a Qantas Airbus A380 had a terrifying engine outage shortly after taking off from Singapore. Scraping of the engine damaged critical systems in the aircraft, but pilots were able to land safely. The incident was blamed for the faulty manufacture of a pipe in the Rolls Royce engine.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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