A Qantas plane made an emergency landing on Friday due to engine failure soon after taking off from Australia’s Sydney Airport, sparking a grassfire on a nearby runway and causing several flights to be diverted.
The Qantas flight, QF520, was bound for Brisbane and was circling for a “short period of time” before landing safely at Sydney Airport, Qantas Chief Pilot Captain Richard Tobiano said in a statement.
“Qantas engineers have conducted a preliminary inspection of the engine and confirmed it was a contained engine failure,” the airline said. “While customers would have heard a loud bang, there was not an explosion.”
The plane was a Boeing 737, a Qantas spokesperson said.
Airservices Australia, the government’s aviation regulator, said the engine failure caused “a grass area adjacent to the runway to catch fire”, which was extinguished by firefighters.
The Airservices’ National Operations Management Centre enacted 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.
Plane passenger Georgina Lewis was onboard the flight and said she heard a “bang”.
“One of the engines appeared to have gone. The pilot came on 10 minutes later to explain that they had a problem with a right-hand engine on take-off,” she told local outlet Channel Nine.
Another passenger Mark Willacy, a journalist with Australia’s national broadcaster ABC, said the plane struggled to get airborne following the “loud bang” noise.
“That big bang as the wheels were leaving the ground and the shudder, that was like nothing I have ever felt,” he told ABC.
“When we landed there was a lot of applause and cheering amongst the passengers.”
Tobiano of Qantas acknowledged that it would have been a “distressing experience for customers”, adding that the airline would conduct an investigation.
The airport was fully operational on Friday evening after 11 domestic flights were cancelled and four diverted, a Sydney Airport spokesperson said.
