Qantas engineers and aviation safety inspectors will examine a plane’s jet engine to determine why it failed on an Auckland-Sydney flight, prompting a mayday call and emergency landing.
The pilot of Qantas Flight 144, a Boeing 737 aircraft, shut down the engine and made the mayday call over the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday afternoon before landing safely at Sydney airport at about 3.30pm.
Passengers reported feeling bumps or a bit of turbulence but said they did not know a mayday had been issued until they landed. No one was hurt and passengers praised the pilot for landing the plane safely on one engine.
Qantas said that while “inflight engine shutdowns” are rare and concerning for passengers, pilots are trained “to manage them safely and aircraft are designed to fly for an extended period on one engine”.
It said all 145 passengers disembarked the aircraft normally.
Aviation expert Neil Hansford told the ABC that “Qantas has never had a passenger lost on a jet aircraft in its history”.
He said Qantas engineers would be immediately investigating what may have caused the engine failure and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau would be initiating an inquiry into the incident.
Photographs taken at the airport show one of the engines appears to have a large panel missing from the engine cover.
‘This is a bit weird’
Passengers told reporters an engine failed but no one onboard appeared panicked during the flight.
“I kind of heard the little bang and then a bit of turbulence, and we just thought okay, this is a bit weird,” passenger Sandika McAuley said.
“But we didn’t really know anything until we landed, then we got told that there was a mayday call and the engine failed.”
Engine failures ‘rare’
Professor Doug Drury, head of aviation at Central Queensland University, told The New Daily engine failures are generally caused by maintenance issues, but stressed that it wasn’t possible to confirm if that was what had occurred in this instance without more information.
“Engine failures in flight for large commercial airliner are pretty rare these days.
“It could have been a maintenance issue of some sort, because the pilots are certainly not going to muck around on the flight deck and inadvertently turn an engine off. So it would have had to have been mechanical failure of some sort,” Professor Drury said.
“Or it could have been something happening to the engine that caused [the pilots] to shut it down … oil pressure starting to go sky high, or exhaust gas temperatures exceeding maximum limits … then the pilots would have shut an engine down.”
He said the Qantas flight would have had to look at how much fuel they had onboard before making the call to land.
“There is a maximum weight a plane can be carrying when it lands, it’s generally a lot less than the maximum weight that we can take off with.
“While inflight engine shutdowns are rare, and would naturally be concerning for passengers,” Qantas said, “our pilots are trained to manage them safely and aircraft are designed to fly for an extended period on one engine.”
‘Highly experienced crew’
Federal Transport Minister Catherine King lauded the airline’s safety record after a scare that had 100,000 people tracking the flight online.
“Well done to the highly experienced crew for getting the plane safely home,” Ms King tweeted.
“Australia’s aviation industry is among the safest in the world because of the dedicated staff working on planes and behind the scenes”.
The Australian and International Pilots Association (IAPA) said in a statement that such mid-air incidents were extremely rare and it was too early to speculate on the engine failure.
“We are pleased the expertly trained and professional Qantas pilots took all the right steps to deal with the incident and were able to safely land back in Sydney.
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