The Australian, November 4 2010

Ulf Waschbusch was elated. “On my way to Australia for the first time and first time on A380!” he tweeted yesterday morning. His next tweet, about two and a half hours later, was rather more subdued. “Just emergency landed back in Singapore after engine two blew up at take-off and parts ripped through wings,” he wrote. “Damn.”

For Singapore-based German national Waschbusch and the other 439 passengers and 26 crew on board, QF32 from Singapore to Sydney was first a shock and then a relief. Passengers said there was a loud bang shortly after takeoff, and then fire from the vast A380 jet’s second engine. The captain announced the plane would dump fuel and return to Singapore to land, which took almost two hours of circling: according to airport officials the plane took off at 9.56am and landed again at 11.46am.

But there were no reports of panic onboard. “Everyone was surprisingly calm on the plane,” Waschbusch said in a telephone interview with Agence France-Presse. “The crew helped tremendously. I felt in good hands. Qantas did a great job in keeping us safe.”

After landing, the aircraft was surrounded by fire trucks and the passengers were unloaded to Changi Airport’s Terminal One. According to an airport official who asked not to be named, the passengers were “briefed by the airline” about what had happened. More than five hours later, around 4.45pm local time, they were escorted through a cordon of steel barricades, flanked by about 40 local media, from the baggage hall to a fleet of waiting coaches and taken to Singapore hotels.

Passengers appeared to have been briefed not to stop and talk to media, and were rushed through by airport security, but some shared a few words. “Frightening,” said one woman. Another spoke of an explosion; a third repeated: “We’re all good. We’re all good.” The pilots, escorted out next, and the cabin crew, who followed them, looked straight ahead and were silent.

If passengers were relieved at their escape, people in the Indonesian island of Batam may have had an even luckier reprieve. Batam, one of the Indonesian islands closest to Singapore, was where debris from the Qantas plane fell. One witness, Noor Kanwa, spoke of “metal shards coming down from the sky”; another, Batam police officer said “most of [the debris] fell in residential areas. There’s a part that looks like a door and shards of aluminium.”

PR group Grayling issued a statement saying  an aircraft would bring passengers back to Sydney this morning.

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