Enrique Guillen said Air France flight AF66 from Paris was passing over Greenland bound for California on Saturday when it was rocked by an uncontained engine failure — a rare emergency in which machinery and other parts break away from the plane at high velocity. The U.S. manufacturer of the engine, Connecticut-based Engine Alliance, said it was investigating the failure, which the airline said caused "serious damage." "The regularly trained pilots and cabin crew handled this serious incident perfectly," Air France said in a statement, adding that none of the 497 passengers was injured. "The passengers are currently being assisted by teams dispatched to the location." "We obviously knew it wasn’t turbulence, it lasted about 30 seconds to one minute and we noticed the place was losing altitude very quickly. Photos from the flight showed the entire front part of the engine, including the large fan and engine's casing, completely sheared away. Pictures taken from inside the Air France plane showed the front cowling and fan disc of the No. In 2010, a Qantas Airbus A380 suffered a major failure of one of its engines shortly after takeoff from Singapore, forcing the crew to troubleshoot a cascading series of failures as a result of the damage the engine's explosion caused to the jet. Speaking from the stricken plane early Sunday, he said passengers had already been waiting nine hours on the ground. Air France said the two flights that will ferry the passengers are scheduled to leave Goose Bay early Sunday.
– Air France Flight AF066 from Paris to Los Angeles on Saturday had been going smoothly, but that all changed more than five hours into the journey, when passengers heard a loud bang, then felt the plane shake and drop before cruising back up. The cause: One of the Airbus A380's four engines had exploded, right as the plane passed over part of Greenland, the New York Times reports. The captain sounded "shaken" as he made the announcement about 20 minutes later, one passenger notes, and so were the passengers, who ended up "white-knuckling" their chairs until the plane safely made an emergency landing two hours later at Goose Bay Airport in Labrador, Canada. An Air France statement confirmed the engine had suffered "serious damage." An MSNBC reporter posted a picture on Twitter from a friend who was on the flight, showing the engine, whose protective covering had been "sheared away," per CNN, and which was spattered with a "brown substance." A CBC reporter posted a short video of the landing, which shows the damaged engine right next to a functional one. "That plane's broken," a man can be heard saying in the video. "The right motor's blown out." CNN notes that an engine failure like this is "incredibly rare," particularly at that point in the flight. Meanwhile, Air France praised its staff, noting in the statement that "the regularly trained pilots and cabin crew handled this serious incident perfectly." An investigation is in the works to discover the cause of the explosion, and the 500 or so passengers were set to be moved out of Goose Bay on new flights Sunday.