In what has to be one of the weirdest videos we’ve seen for a while, travellers on board a Russian passenger plane chat and laugh as they watch one of the plane’s two engines burn in flight.
The incident occurred last week in Russia on a Red Wings flight headed to the resort city of Sochi by the Black Sea.
The plane’s left engine began to spark and burn during an emergency landing, and the fire was captured by one of the passengers.
The Russian-made Tupolev TU-204 aircraft was carrying 215 passengers and seven crew.
According to a report in the Aviation Herald, the plane’s engine surged just before take-off, but the control tower spotted it from the ground and let them know. The crew, however, pushed on until about 500m when the fire “became visible through gaps in the engine cowl emitting smoke, fire and sparks”.
Fire indication alerts in the cockpit didn’t work, nor did the emergency fire suppression system, so the crew manually shut down the engine.
The plane landed safely five minutes later, and passengers were evacuated on slides while emergency crews put out the fire. No one was injured.
While this may sound like a nightmare to most, if not all flyers, the passengers onboard are heard casually chatting and occasionally laughing during the harrowing ordeal.
How would you react to such a sight?
Related articles:
Is your plane old and dangerous?
The scariest flight of my life
Woman sucked out of plane
