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<\/b>
\nAn Air France flight from Paris to Los Angeles made an emergency landing in eastern Canada after one of its four engines sustained \u201cserious damage\u201d 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.
\u201cThe regularly trained pilots and cabin crew handled this serious incident perfectly,\u201d 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\u2019s Pratt & Whitney unit.
The forced landing in Canada\u2019s 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 \u2013 six A380s at the time \u2013 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.
\u201cWe heard this tremendous bang. It was like the plane hit a Jeep at 35,000 feet,\u201d passenger Pamela Adams said.
\u201cWe grabbed onto something and then we sat down, and the plane righted itself fairly soon.\u201d
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.
\u201cEngine failure halfway over the Atlantic Ocean … birdstrike possibility,\u201d he wrote.
A fellow passenger, Iskandar, tweeted that the AF66 passengers \u201chave a memory of their flight which will last a long time\u201d.
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 \u201creports of an issue\u201d 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\u2019s 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<\/p>\n

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