United Airlines flight UA328, carrying 231 passengers and 10 crew on board, returns to Denver International Airport with its starboard engine on fire after it called a Mayday alert, over Denver, Colorado.
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Debris from a United Airlines plane fell onto Denver suburbs during an emergency landing Saturday after one of its engines suffered a catastrophic failure and rained pieces of the engine casing on a neighborhood where it narrowly missed a home.
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The plane landed safely, and nobody aboard or on the ground was reported hurt, authorities said.
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The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the Boeing 777-200 returned to the Denver International Airport after experiencing a right-engine failure shortly after takeoff.
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Flight 328 was flying from Denver to Honolulu when the incident occurred, the agency said.
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United said in a separate statement that there were 231 passengers and 10 crew on board. All passengers were to be rebooked on a new flight to Hawaii, the airline said.
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The Broomfield Police Department posted photos on Twitter showing large, circular pieces of debris leaning against a house in the suburb about 40 kilometers north of Denver. Police are asking that anyone injured come forward.
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Passengers recounted a terrifying ordeal that began to unfold shortly after the plane full of vacationers took off. The aircraft was almost at cruising altitude and the captain was giving an announcement over the intercom when a large explosion rocked the cabin, accompanied by a bright flash.
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"The plane started shaking violently, and we lost altitude and we started going down," said David Delucia, who was sitting directly across the aisle from the side with the failed engine. "When it initially happened, I thought we were done. I thought we were going down."
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On the ground, witnesses also heard the explosion and were scared for those on board.
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Video posted on Twitter showed the engine fully engulfed in flames as the plane flew through the air.
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Aviation safety experts said the plane appeared to have suffered an uncontained and catastrophic engine failure. Such an event is extremely rare and happens when huge spinning discs inside the engine suffer some sort of failure and breach the armored casing around the engine that is designed to contain the damage, said John Cox, an aviation safety expert and retired airline pilot who runs an aviation safety consulting firm called Safety Operating Systems.
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"That unbalanced disk has a lot of force in it, and it's spinning at several thousand rotations per minute ... and when you have that much centrifugal force, it has to go somewhere," he said in a phone interview.
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Former NTSB Chairman Jim Hall called the incident another example of "cracks in our culture in aviation safety (that) need to be addressed. Hall, who was on the board from 1994 to 2001, has criticized the FAA over the past decade as "drifting toward letting the manufacturers provide the aviation oversight that the public was paying for." That goes especially for Boeing, he said.
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Despite the scary appearance of a flaming engine, most such incidents don't result in loss of life, Cox said.
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The last fatality on a US airline flight involved such an engine failure on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas in April 2018. A passenger was killed when the engine disintegrated more than 30,000 feet above Pennsylvania and debris struck the plane, breaking the window next to her seat. She was forced halfway out the window before other passengers pulled her back inside.
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A North Metro firefighter walks past airplane debris on Elmwood St. near E. 13th Ave.
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People look over debris that fell off a plane that shed parts over a neighborhood in Broomfield.
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Debris fallen from a United Airlines airplane's engine in a the neighborhood of Broomfield, outside Denver, Colorado.
Image Credit: AFP
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