Singapore. A Qantas A380 superjumbo made a dramatic emergency landing in Singapore Thursday after experiencing engine trouble over Indonesia, in the first mid-air emergency involving the giant Airbus plane.The double-decker plane, which had taken off from Singapore bound for Sydney carrying 433 passengers, dumped fuel over Indonesia before returning to the city-state's Changi Airport trailing smoke. Six fire engines swarmed the A380 on landing, spraying liquid on it, according to an AFP reporter.
One of the engines on the left wing looked to be missing, and the area around it was black, the reporter said. Plane debris including what appeared to be part of the tail of a Qantas jet was found in the Indonesian town of Batam, after a mid-air explosion was heard on the ground. "I didn't see a plane crash but I heard a loud explosion in the air. There were metal shards coming down from the sky into an industrial area in Batam," witness Noor Kanwa said.
A spokesman for Australia's Qantas Airways said the plane was carrying 433 passengers and 26 crew members and there were no immediate reports of injuries. Qantas, which has never suffered a fatal crash in its 90-year history, said earlier there had "definitely" not been a crash involving one of its planes over Indonesia."We're just waiting on a report," a spokeswoman said. "At this stage there's definitely been no crash."
The A380's very first commercial flight operated by Singapore Airlines was on the same Singapore-Sydney route in October 2007. Since then, fuel and computer glitches have grounded several A380s and at least one Air France flight was forced to turn around and land in New York after problems with its navigation system in November 2009.Witnesses on the western Indonesian island of Batam reported hearing a large blast and seeing pieces of debris — including panels painted white and red — falling onto houses and a nearby shopping mall.
Pictures of metal, some the size of a door, flashed on MetroTV, with people milling around.“I heard a big explosion at around 9:15 a.m. and saw a commercial passenger plane flying low in the distance with smoke on one of its wings,” Rusdi, a local resident, told MetroTV. “The debris started falling on my house.”