Loud bang forces Emirates to turn back

Updated: 14:03, Monday November 12, 2012

Passengers have told of a loud bang and flashes of light coming from the engine of an Emirates A380 airliner that was forced to turn back to Sydney Airport shortly after taking off.

The captain of flight EK413 bound for Dubai on Sunday night turned back about 20 minutes after take-off.

Passenger John Fothergill of Auckland said he saw a flash.

'I thought it could have been lightning but then we saw flames come out of the engine. The whole interior of the A380 lit up,' he told News Limited.

'You'd have to say there were two or three metre flames. (The) explosion shook the plane, there was a bigger judder.'

Passenger Ross Clarke said there had been a loud bang.

'We were told by the pilot that something had gone wrong on the starboard engine, number three engine,' he told the Seven Network.

Emirates flight attendants moved to the windows to observe and asked passengers what they had seen.

Mr Fothergill's wife, Amal Aburawi, said the attendants appeared to panic more than the passengers.

'Everyone was running left and right, no-one knowing what's happened,' she told News Limited.

Dr Aburawi criticised the attendants for not informing some non-English speaking passengers of the incident in Arabic so they could understand why the plane had turned back.

She said there were many Arabic-speaking passengers, many of them elderly women.

Emirates said an engine fault was to blame for the incident and it apologised for any inconvenience to passengers.

It said the pilot contacted ground crew at Sydney Airport and a decision was made to dump fuel and turn back.

Passengers were re-booked on alternative flights.

Meanwhile a Virgin Australia plane bound for Cairns also turned back to Sydney Airport on Sunday night after the pilot reported an odour in the cockpit.

A Virgin spokeswoman said the pilot of the Embraer E-190 decided to turn back as a precautionary measure and the flight with about 100 people aboard landed without incident.

She said engineers found one of the electronic monitors in the cockpit was faulty and it was replaced.

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