A Qantas flight 747 that carrying 212 passengers and a crew of 18 forced to turn back San Francisco due to engine failure. A passenger has described hearing a "deep metallic groan" and seeing flames streaming from a Sydney-bound Qantas jet engine after it failed and punched a hole in the metal shell around it.
After troubleshooting, the pilots decided to shut the engine down and dumped the fuel as a precaution. They also made an appropriate decision to head back San Fracisco.
Luckily, there were no injuries during the landing, Qantas spokesman Simon Rushton said, and the plane was able to pull up to the aerobridge at the terminal so passengers could get off the plane.
Although engine failure is a very rare event, Barry Jackson of the Australian and International Pilots Association said pilots had always been trained regularly for it. He said the captain would have followed a standard drill that involved shutting down and isolating the engine from other parts of the plane. Besides, dumping fuel was also necessary to get the plane's weight down to its maximum landing weight, he said.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US said Qantas would prepare a report for the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board.
"Whatever Qantas does is going to have to meet with our approval too," an FAA spokesman said.
"The bottom line is we want to make sure and know that that aircraft is airworthy when they are saying they want to put it back on line."
Critique: Always, there are things that happened out of our expectations. Therefore, precautionary measures should often be taken to help us get ready to deal with the worse situation. Life is unpredictable, we can never forecast what is going to happen in the next second.
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