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12 March, 2018

“Huge bang and shaking”: Qantas passengers told to take brace position

Melbourne, Australia - November 19, 2012: Qantas Airways Airbus A380 registered VH-OQF takes off as QF93 to Los Angeles (LAX) from Melbourne International Airport at Tullamarine, Victoria.

Passengers on board a Qantas flight heading from Alice Springs to Brisbane were told to take the brace position after a “huge bang”.

Flyers were already agitated as the flight took off an hour and 20 minutes after it was scheduled to.

According to News.com, passengers have said the plane began to violently shake before landing, with many taking the brace position.

Others, who feared the worst, turned on their mobiles to send farewell messages to loved ones.

Speaking to the Daily Mail Australia, passenger Tash Hennig said she feared she would never see her daughter again.

“I flipped my phone from flight mode so I could tell her to call her aunt, and that I loved her,” she said.

“As the flight attendants went through the emergency procedures I was just crying on my partner’s chest.”

“After the bang, there was a lot of vibrating. They didn’t tell us much. I am pretty mad I thought I was going to die and so did everyone else,” she added.

The problem is being blamed on an engine fault, and engineers are currently inspecting the plane.

“It was a fairly scary flight for a lot of people, there were more tears and concern than screaming though,” Hennig’s partner Darren Adams said.

Amid the fear, Hennig was careful not to “be hysterical and scare the children in the seats across the aisle”.

“I made eye contact with the mother of the children – we were holding each other’s stare knowing we couldn’t freak out because of the kids,” she added.

Qantas has now been criticised for downplaying the accident.

Speaking to The Courier-Mail a Qantas spokeswoman said: “The pilots followed standard procedure, shut down the engine, and the flight landed normally in Brisbane at 6pm.”

“Passengers disembarked shortly after,” she said.

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Latest comments

Maxwell Smart says:
March 12, 2018 at 1:21 pm
most twin engine jet commercial aircraft can fly a loooong way on one engine. The flight attendants can’t tell you much if they don’t know what’s going on & the pilots were probably a little bit busy, to say the leats, assessing the situation.
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