Fear, relief after debris rains down
People on plane, ground terrified as engine blows
BROOMFIELD, Colo. — David Delucia was starting to relax on his way to a long-awaited vacation whenahugeexplosionandflashof light interrupted an in-flight announcement.
The Boeing 777-200 he was on, headed from Denver to Honolulu on Saturday with 231 passengers and 10 crew aboard, sustained a catastrophic failure in its right engine and flames erupted under the wing as the plane began to lose altitude.
As Delucia and his wife prepared for the worst, people in this Denver suburb reacted in horror as huge pieces of the engine casing and chunks of fiberglass rained down on a sports fields and on streets and lawns, just missing one home and crushing a truck. The explosion, visible from the ground, left a trail of black smoke in the sky, and tiny 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 hurt, authorities said. But both 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. “The pilot did an amazing job. It was pretty unnerving.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the airplane experienced a right-engine failure shortly after takeoff.
Video posted on Twitter showed the engine engulfed in flames as the plane flew through the air. Freeze frames from different video taken by a passenger sitting slightly in front of the engine and posted on Twitter appeared to show a broken fan blade in the engine.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Authorities have not released any details about what may have caused the failure.
The Broomfield Police Department posted photos on Twitter showing large, circular pieces of debris that appeared to be the engine cowling leaning against a house in the suburb about 16 miles northwest of Denver.
Kirby Klements was inside with his wife when they heard a huge booming sound, he said. A few seconds later, the couple saw a massive piece of debris fly past their window and into the bed of Klements’ truck, crushing the cab and pushing the vehicle into the dirt.
He estimated the circular engine cowling at 15 feet in diameter. Fine pieces of the fiberglass insulation used in the airplane engine fell from the sky “like ash” for about 10 minutes, he said, and several large chunks of insulation landed in his backyard.
“If it had been 10 feet different, it would have landed right on top of the house,” he said in a phone interview with the AP. “And if anyone had been in the truck, they would have been dead.”
An uncontained and catastrophic engine failure is extremely rare and happens when huge spinning pieces inside the engine sustain some sort of failure and breach an 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.
Pilots practice how to deal with such an event frequently and would have immediately shut off anything flammable in the engine, including fuel and hydraulic fluid, using a single switch, Cox said.
The last fatality on a U.S. 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.