A passenger jet carrying actor Leonardo DiCaprio and more than 200 other people turned back and made an emergency landing after an engine failed, it emerged yesterday.
The drama happened as the Boeing 767 took off from New York on Sunday, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The Moscow-bound Delta Flight 30 had just taken off from New York’s John F Kennedy Airport when other pilots reported seeing a flash in one engine.
The twin-engine Boeing flew out over the Atlantic ocean, dumped part of its fuel and returned safely to the airport.
Crews were putting a new engine on the airliner and planned to return it to service, Delta spokesman Anthony Black said today.
Such engine failures have drawn special attention from safety chiefs since January 2009, when a US Airways jet lost both engines and landed in the Hudson River after hitting a formation of birds.
But FAA investigators who took an initial look at the engine that failed on Sunday said “there was no indication of feathers or anything that would indicate a bird strike”, FAA official Laura Brown said.
Mr DiCaprio, who was travelling to St Petersburg, Russia, to attend a conference on protecting tigers, praised the pilot and flight crew for safely landing the plane, his publicist said.
Delta thanked Mr DiCaprio, who was nominated for an Oscar for portraying airman Howard Hughes in the 2004 film The Aviator, for the acknowledgement.
“From one aviator to another, thanks for acknowledging our crews’ professionalism and focus on safety,” Delta said on Twitter.
Moments after take-off the flight crew radioed air traffic controllers, saying: “We’re declaring an emergency and need to climb out straight ahead, ... We’re going to return and land,” according to a copy of the radio transmissions provided to The Associated Press by LiveATC.net, which streams voice traffic from airports.
An air traffic controller asked other departing planes: “Did you see something small come out of the No 1 engine?”
One pilot reported seeing “some kind of flash”. Another said he “witnessed like a flameout and smoke off the back of Delta ... about 300 feet off the ground”.
The Delta pilot explained the si-tuation to controllers shortly afterwards, saying: “We’ve lost the left engine. What we’re going to do is we’re going to head out to the east right now and get over the water and we’ll start dumping some gas.”
At that point the plane was flying at an altitude of only 2,000 feet, about 25 miles south east of Kennedy airport but was directed to climb to 5,000 feet while dumping fuel, the transmissions indicate.
Controllers repeatedly advised other airliners nearby that the Boeing 767 was dumping fuel.
As the plane readied for the emergency landing, the pilot reported 74,000lbs of fuel and 200 “souls” on board. Fire and rescue equipment was standing ready as the plane landed on runway four left, the second-longest of JFK’s four runways at 11,351 feet.
Mr Black said the jetliner’s co-pilot was at the controls at the time of the engine failure and continued through to the landing.