Footage shows the moment a Boeing 747 left streaks of flames across the sky when its engine caught fire soon after taking off from Miami International Airport.
Flight audio from the Atlas Air cargo plane reveals the pilot said “mayday mayday” as he requested access back to the same airport and revealed he had five people onboard.
The plane had to make an emergency landing at Miami International Airport (MIA) on Thursday night after “experiencing an engine malfunction soon after departure”, a spokesperson from the airline said.
“The crew followed all standard procedures and safely returned to MIA.”
The video has emerged as Boeing faces scrutiny over the safety of its planes after a window and a chunk of fuselage blew out of a Boeing 737-9 MAX passenger plane shortly after take-off from Oregon on 5 January.
A window and chunk of fuselage blew out of a Boeing 737-9 MAX passenger plane this month
During Thursday night’s incident, the Boeing 747 was on its way to Luis Munoz Marin International Airport in Puerto Rico when the crew reported an engine failure, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement on Friday.
The FAA has said it will investigate the incident, while Atlas will also conduct an inspection to determine the cause of the fire.
In the flight audio obtained by Sky News’ US partner network NBC News, the pilot can be heard saying: “Mayday, mayday… We have an engine fire. Request access back to the airport. No, we’ll go ahead and land. We have five souls onboard.”
Meanwhile, Melanie Adaros who lives near the airport, was out for a walk with her mother when she captured a video of the plane leaving streaks of fire across the sky.
“There’s always planes flying overhead, but they’re little planes,” she said.
“But this didn’t sound like a little plane. It sounded very low, so I turned… You always see a plane going up or going down. This one was just at a steady level and it was shooting sparks. It was very surreal.”
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The fire could be seen by people on the ground
Ms Adaros said she recorded it with her phone thinking: “Is it falling? Is it going to explode?”.
“It seemed to do a big, wide, swerving turn” in the direction of Miami International Airport, she said.
Atlas Air hauls everything from machinery to perishable food and pharmaceuticals and also provides charter services for passengers, according to its website.
Boeing under the spotlight
More than 170 planes were grounded by US regulators after the blow-out above Oregon at the beginning of this month, with Boeing saying it fully supported a requirement for inspections on aircraft of a similar type.
Alaska Airlines passenger Evan Smith said a boy and his mother were sitting in the row where the window blew out and the boy’s shirt was torn off him and sucked out of the plane.
A former US congressman – who led an extensive investigation into previous issues with Boeing planes – accused the company of relying on “crappy stuff” from its subcontractor after the incident.