Bad Day at the Office

Bad day at the office


Not what I want to see out the window

United Airlines flight 328 from Denver to Honolulu suffered an uncontained engine failure shortly after takeoff, shedding debris over a Denver neighborhood, and requiring a return and emergency landing back at Denver International Airport (DEN).

No injuries have been reported, but I'm pretty sure that some of the passengers and crew will have nightmares over this for years:

A United Airlines flight with 241 people on board experienced engine failure over a suburb of Boulder, Colo., on Saturday afternoon, shedding debris across three neighborhoods before landing safely in Denver, the authorities said.

There were no injuries reported, officials said.

The flight, No. 328, took off from Denver International Airport at 12:15 p.m. local time, said Alex Renteria, an airport spokeswoman.

The F.A.A. said in a statement that the plane, a Boeing 777-200, experienced “a right-engine failure” shortly after takeoff and that it was aware of reports of debris “in the vicinity of the airplane’s flight path.”

The flight was headed from Denver to Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu when the episode happened.

………

The police in Broomfield, Colo., which is about 15 miles southeast of Boulder, said unspecified pieces of the plane fell across three neighborhoods around 1:08 p.m. local time.

………

In a video on Twitter, passengers can be heard cheering as the plane safely lands.

Something important to note here, in December, a JAL 777 of similar vintage with the same engines also suffered a very similar engine failure, so I would expect that any Pratt & Whitney PW4077 engine would be getting some pretty intense scrutiny right now.