Early Monday morning, a United Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after a passenger spotted flames coming out from one of the plane’s engines.
The flight was traveling from San Diego to Chicago and landed in Albuquerque after the emergency was discovered. Fortunately, United was able to organize another aircraft to take passengers to their destination in Chicago.
Thomas Chorny, a passenger on the flight sitting in seat 34F, managed to record the flames shooting out of the engine.
Chorny tells CNN, “The plane started to shake a bit like it was hitting turbulence, but the wings were still perfectly still. I was halfway falling asleep but opened my eyes to look out the window and saw flames shooting from the right engine.”
He goes on to share, “They shut down the engine to idle, and the flames went out and then they started banking left for quite a while and we dropped a bunch of altitudes. It took another 10 minutes or so before they announced that we would be landing at Albuquerque.”
Although Chorny saw the flames, he didn’t talk about it with fellow passengers because he didn’t want to “freak people out.”
“It’s a strange feeling to sit there not knowing exactly what was going on, but it was very easy to start getting emotional just thinking about what might have happened,” says Chorny.
United Airlines released a statement saying, “The flight landed safely, and customers deplaned normally at the gate. Our maintenance team in Albuquerque will inspect the aircraft and we’ve arranged for a different plane to get our customers to their destination which has departed.”
There have been no reported injuries and according to United, there will be a full inspection to confirm the issue with the engine.