Airlines in several countries have decided to keep certain Boeing passenger planes on the ground.
Boeing is among the largest aerospace companies in the world. One of its models currently flies with an engine made by another aerospace company, Pratt and Whitney and there was a major problem over the weekend when one of these planes powered by one of these engines.
On a United Airlines flight from Denver, Colorado to Honolulu, Hawaii, there was an engine failure on Saturday afternoon. Passengers aboard the plane and people on the ground heard a loud boom. The pilot immediately radioed a distress signal and turned the plane back toward Denver International Airport.
Despite the explosion and the debris that fell from the plane onto some populated areas of Denver, no one was hurt either on the aircraft or on the ground. Several of the 241 people aboard the plane said they held hands and prayed and after the flight landed safely back at the airport, people cheered before they got off the plane.
The aircraft was a Boeing 777, the engine was a Pratt and Whitney Model 4000. As U.S. government investigators tried to find out exactly what went wrong, a source told cnn they believe a fan blade in the engine came off and destroyed another blade leading to the failure. The Federal Aviation Administration is recommending more frequent inspections of this specific engine and several airlines in the United States, South Korea and Japan are following Boeings recommendation to ground dozens of these aircraft while the new safety measures are put in place.
There was a separate incident on Saturday involving a different Boeing aircraft powered by the same Pratt and Whitney engine. One of these engines caught fire on a 747 cargo flight that was flying over the Netherlands. That also happened shortly after takeoff. The crew also made it back down safely but the debris that fell from that plane did mildly injure two people on the ground. Boeing has joined the U.S. government in investigating what happened there.
