My Qantas Engine Explosion Adventure - from 2007 - Rosemary Picado

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Musings on the sacred and the mundane.

Rosemary Picado

Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Birthday: October 13

Title: Technical Writer

Bio: Rosemary Picado has written for the San Jose Mercury News, Budget Savvy, and City ReVolt magazine. She currently works as a technical writer.

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AUGUST 31, 2010 3:59PM

My Qantas Engine Explosion Adventure - from 2007

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My friend Erica and I get our Aussie Adventure underway, we thought.

When I saw the news this morning about the Qantas flight out of SFO losing an engine, it was dejavu all over again.

In the wee hours of the morning on Monday, August 30th, Qantas flight 74, a 747 with 212 passengers on board, was taking off from SFO for Sydney Australia when an engine blew. As reported, the pilot went through the procedure: circled, dumped fuel to get to the proper landing weight, and thankfully returned to the airport without incident.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, experts are calling the event "extremely rare."

Not in my experience.

The same thing happend to me in May of 2007, on a flight out of LAX. In fact, I went back to my old MySpace blog (which I haven't looked at in months) and found my entry there from that day.

First of all, let me say everyone's safe and sound, but we had a bit of an adventure last night on Qantas flight 26 out of LAX. About 5 minutes after takeoff, we lost engine 1. It didn't sound like much at the time, just a bang. I thought the landing gear had come up a bit hard. But one passenger I talked to saw it blow with flames shooting out the back. They told us later that a turbine blew.

My seatmate, a very cute 20 year old cowboy from Washington state, said after the bang, "I think we hit a deer."

"This is Qantas," I corrected. "We hit a kangaroo."

The captain came on the PA straight away and told us what was going on, said there was nothing to worry about. This is a big plane with 4 engines. They had to go through the procedure to dump fuel so we could go in and land. That took about 40 minutes of us circling round and around. Then they warned us that when we came in, we'd see fire trucks and emergency crews with the lights on. Standard procedure.

They warned us that the landing might be hard, but it was smooth as silk. Actually, it was better than my landing coming from SJ earlier that day. Everyone clapped. No one was really scared, and I think it was due to the fact that they kept us informed about what was going on.

After we landed after midnight, they kept us on board for about an hour, but they fed us while they worked to get us all hotel rooms. We stayed the night at the Hilton and we'll be on another flight tonight to try it again. So a bit of a false start to the Aussie adventure, but at least we can laugh about it!

Erica's watch reads 1:16 am, the time we got back into the LAX terminal to get in line for our hotel voucher.

First, let me repeat the old chestnut, any landing you can walk away from is a good one. Another important fact to repeat here: Qantas Airlines has never crashed. I have no complaints, only concerns that the Qantas fleet may be getting old, overstressed, and perhaps should be upgraded.

But after our false start, I had a fabulous experience with Qantas. We bought the Aussie Airpass, and visited Melbourne, Cairnes, Brisbane, and Sydney on our three week trip. We had absolutely no other incidents or even delays. I wouldn't hesitate to travel with them again.

The passengers of Qantas flight 74 were definitely inconvenienced last night, but they're safe - and they get an extra day in San Francisco. In 2007, Erica and I took advantage of our extra day in Los Angeles to see the sights and do touristy stuff we normally would never do: go to the Walk of Fame, Muscle Beach, and the Farmers Market. It was a great start to our Aussie Adventure, and made a great story.

Especially today.