A Nest camera in a suburban Denver neighborhood caught the metallic object hitting the ground with such force that it jumped several meters into the air.
Fortunately, no one was hurt by the falling debris.
Meanwhile, passengers on the flight reported their reactions when the incident happened.
David Delucia was settling into his plane seat and starting to relax on his way to the long-awaited vacation when a huge explosion and a flash of light interrupted an in-flight announcement and put him in survival mode.
The Boeing 777-200, leaving Denver for Honolulu on Saturday with 231 passengers and 10 crew members on board, suffered a catastrophic failure in its right engine and flames exploded under the wing when the plane began to lose altitude.
As Delucia and his wife prepared for the worst, people in this Denver suburb reacted in horror when huge pieces of the engine frame and bits of fiberglass rained down on sports fields and on the streets and lawns, narrowly missing a house and crushing a truck. The explosion, visible from the ground, left a trail of black smoke in the sky, and small pieces of insulation filled the air like ash.
The plane landed safely at Denver International Airport and no one on board or on the ground was injured, officials said. But both those in the air and those on the ground were deeply shaken.
“When it first happened, I thought we were done. I thought we were going to fall,” said Delucia, who stuffed his wallet in his pocket to be easily identified if the plane really crashed. “The pilot did an incredible job. It was quite unnerving.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the plane suffered a failure in the right engine shortly after takeoff.
The video posted on Twitter showed the engine totally engulfed in flames as the plane flew through the air. Frozen pictures of different videos taken by a passenger sitting a little in front of the engine and posted on Twitter seemed to show a broken fan in the engine.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Authorities have not released details of what may have caused the failure.
United said in a separate statement that most passengers on United flight 328 were rescheduled on a new flight to Hawaii, but some chose to stay overnight at a hotel.
The Broomfield Police Department posted photos on Twitter showing large circular pieces of debris that appeared to be the bonnet leaning against a suburban home about 16 miles (40 kilometers) northwest of Denver. The police asked all the wounded on the ground to report.
Tyler Thal, who lives in the area, told the Associated Press that he was walking with his family when he noticed a large commercial plane flying strangely low and picked up his phone to film it.
“While I was looking at it, I saw an explosion and then a cloud of smoke and some debris falling from it. It was like a speck in the sky and, as I watch this, I am telling my family what I just saw and then we heard the explosion, “he said in a telephone interview. “The plane just went on, and we didn’t see it after that.”
Kirby Klements was inside with his wife when they heard a loud bang, he said. A few seconds later, the couple saw a large piece of debris fly by the window and fall into the body of Klements’s truck, crushing the cabin and pushing the vehicle to the ground.
He estimated the engine’s circular fairing to be 15 feet (4.5 meters) in diameter. Thin pieces of fiberglass insulation used in the plane’s engine fell from the sky “like ash” for about 10 minutes, he said, and several large pieces of insulation landed in his backyard.
“If it had been 3 meters apart, it would have landed right on top of the house,” he said in a telephone interview with the AP. “And if someone were in the truck, they would be dead.”
Based on the initial photos and videos posted by the passengers, aviation security experts said the plane appeared to have suffered an uncontrolled and catastrophic engine failure.
Such an event is extremely rare and occurs when large rotating parts inside the engine fail and break an armored housing around the engine designed to contain the damage, said John Cox, an aviation security expert and retired airline pilot. which operates an aviation security consulting firm called Safety Operating Systems.
“This unbalanced disk is very strong and is spinning at several thousand revolutions per minute … and when you have so much centrifugal force, it needs to go somewhere,” he said in a telephone interview.
Pilots practice how to handle this type of event frequently and immediately turn off anything flammable in the engine, including fuel and hydraulic fluid, using a single button, Cox said.
Former NTSB president Jim Hall called the incident another example “cracks in our aviation security culture (which) need to be resolved”.
Hall, who served on the board from 1994 to 2001, has criticized the FAA in the past decade, saying it “let manufacturers provide the aviation oversight the public was paying for.” This is especially true for Boeing, he said.
The latest fatality on a United States airline flight involved an engine failure on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas in April 2018. One passenger died when the engine disintegrated more than 30,000 feet above Pennsylvania and debris hit the plane, smashing the window next to his seat. She was forced out of the window before other passengers pulled her back inside.
In that case, the failure was attributed to a broken fan blade on a Boeing 737 engine. The Federal Aviation Administration has ordered airlines to step up fan blade inspections on certain engines made by CFM International, a joint venture of General Electric and France Safran SA
In 2010, a Qantas Airbus A380 suffered a frightening unrestrained engine failure shortly after Singapore’s takeoff. Engine shrapnel damaged critical systems on the plane, but the pilots managed to land safely. The incident was attributed to the faulty manufacture of a tube in the Rolls Royce engine.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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