File image (AAP). Image of the damaged plane
An Air France A380 superjumbo passenger jet traveling from Paris to Los Angeles was forced to make an emergency landing in eastern Canada on Saturday following “serious damage” to one of its four engines, the airline said.
(Reuters) – An Air France flight from Paris to Los Angeles made an emergency landing in eastern Canada on Saturday 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, 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.
Rick Engebretsen, one of the passengers, wrote a Twitter message saying he had heard a loud thud and felt vibration while in the air.
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 trans-Atlantic flights commonly use Goose Bay Airport in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador for emergency fueling stops.
“Flight 066 landed without further damage at the Goose Bay military airport in Canada and all of the 520 people on board were evacuated with no injuries,” an Air France spokesman in Paris told AFP.
The double-decker, wide-body aircraft was re-routed as it passed over Greenland, landing in Goose Bay at 1542 GMT, the spokesman said.
The landing went off “normally” for the jetliner carrying 496 passengers and 24 crew members, the spokesman said. The airline was exploring options to get the passengers to the United States.
Video and photo images posted on social media, apparently by passengers or their relatives, showed extensive damage to the front of the outer starboard engine, with part of its external cowling stripped away.
Air France operates 10 Airbus A380s, which are the largest passenger planes in the world.
Their version of the craft uses GP7200 engines, a giant turbofan built by General Electric and Pratt and Whitney of the US.
Goose Bay is a base operated by the Royal Canadian Air Force but is also a designated standby airport for diverted transatlantic flights.
