Video and photo images posted on social media, apparently by passengers, showed extensive damage to the front of the outer starboard engine, with part of its external cowling stripped away
An Air France flight from Paris to Los Angeles made an emergency landing in eastern Canada after one of its four engines sustained “serious damage” over the Atlantic, the airline said.
Air France Flight 66, originating at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, landed at Goose Bay in Labrador at 1542 GMT on Saturday, the airline said, and no one was hurt in the incident.
“The regularly trained pilots and cabin crew handled this serious incident perfectly,” the airline said in a statement.
The aircraft involved in the incident was an Airbus 380 that was about seven years old, according to airfleets.net, an aircraft database. The engine was made by Engine Alliance, a joint venture between General Electric Co and United Technologies Corp’s Pratt & Whitney unit.
The forced landing in Canada’s easternmost province is reminiscent of an incident seven years ago in which one of the Rolls-Royce engines on a Qantas A380 suffered mid-engine damage after taking off in Singapore. The November 2010 incident prompted the grounding of the entire Qantas A380 fleet – six A380s at the time – for over three weeks.
Photographs taken by passengers aboard the Air France flight circulated on the internet soon after the aircraft landed.
The images appeared to show that the inlet, or front part, of the engine had torn off, but the main part of the engine was intact.
“We heard this tremendous bang. It was like the plane hit a Jeep at 35,000 feet,” passenger Pamela Adams said.
“We grabbed onto something and then we sat down, and the plane righted itself fairly soon.”
Passengers nervously joked to one another as they tried to make sense of the commotion, Adams said. She figured the plane had struck a bird, but then, it became clear that the situation was more dramatic.
The pilot came on over the loudspeaker and said the plane had lost one of its engines and would be landing in Canada, Adams said.
Rick Engebretsen, another passenger, wrote a Twitter message saying he had heard a loud thud and felt vibration while in the air.
Passenger, Miguel Amador, posted online brief video footage apparently filmed from a window of the plane showing the damaged engine.
“Engine failure halfway over the Atlantic Ocean … birdstrike possibility,” he wrote.
A fellow passenger, Iskandar, tweeted that the AF66 passengers “have a memory of their flight which will last a long time”.
Air France operates 10 Airbus A380s, which are the largest passenger planes in the world.
It was not immediately clear how the engine became damaged. Airbus was not immediately available for comment. Engine Alliance said in a statement that it was looking into “reports of an issue” involving one of its engines.
Officials with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday. The airline said it was making arrangements to send the plane’s passengers to their destination of Los Angeles.
Aircraft on transatlantic flights commonly use Goose Bay Airport in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador for emergency fuelling stops.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
