None of the flight’s passengers or crew were injured in the chilling incident, and passengers, who were headed to the Hajj, were boarded onto a new flight later Wednesday.

A Boeing 747-400 with 468 people aboard was forced to make an emergency landing in Indonesia on Wednesday after one of its engines caught fire and began shooting out flames during takeoff.

The Garuda Indonesia flight was bound for Medina, Saudi Arabia, which is the entry point for many Muslims making their pilgrimage to Mecca. It left from Indonesia’s international airport in Makassar, where clips showed one of the plane’s four engines becoming engulfed in flames during takeoff on Wednesday evening.

Videos of the engine fire were shared online by JACDEC, a plane crash data evaluation firm, which showed that the flames began just as the plane had lifted from the runway.

  • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
    202·
    6 months ago

    completed an approximately 90-minute holding pattern before safely returning to and landing in Makassar.

    Lol wtf!? I get that it was past the point of no return and had to commit to take off but a 90 min wait to land again seems insane.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
        145·
        6 months ago

        It’s weird they designed it to lose an engine. They should have designed it not to lose an engine. That would have been better.

        • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
          5·
          6 months ago

          Well, we have already.

          The Internet was designed to be resilient against nuclear war. Most protocols are resilient, it’s just been the last few years that some companies abused their positions (Cloudflare, Google) and it also came to light, that some protocols have been designed with a tad too much trust (BGP, SMTP).

          • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            I am aware… I meant more so with the recent trends… We have p2p ffs. So its not the tech its how its being built.

      • supercriticalcheese@lemmy.world
        21·
        6 months ago

        ETOPS is not required for 747s. Being a 4 engine plane it can run fine with him three. So an engine failure is not an actual emergency although you will still need to land cause of the reduced performance running with three engines.

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
      17·
      6 months ago

      My guess is that they wanted the plane to use up most of the fuel before attempting the landing. As long as the plane is flying, the speed of the plane adds a level of safety to the fire. Once the plane lands and slows down, that fire would start affecting the rest of the wing much more, but there can’t be a big kaboom anymore if the fuel tanks are empty.

      • Hildegarde@lemmy.world
        24·
        6 months ago

        Long distance 747 flighs usually take off above the maximum landng weight. They need to get rid of the fuel before landing, but the 400 has the ability to dump fuel.

        The engine wasn’t on fire. The engine had a surge on takeoff. They would have shut the engine off as it might have been damaged, but the plane was not on fire. They would have landed much sooner if it was.

        Many articles describe engine surges with language that, while not technically a lie, is written to make readers conclude that the airplane is actually on fire.

    • Hildegarde@lemmy.world
      8·
      6 months ago

      Plane was not on fire. Passengers were in no immediate danger. Its safer to keep flying and prepare than make a hasty landing for no reason.

    • derf82@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      Landing overweight can be even more dangerous. The engine was shut down and they can fly just fine on 3 engines.