Airliner Lands With Gaping Hole in Fuselage

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The 346 passengers were cruising at 29,000 feet Friday when an explosive bang shook the Qantas jumbo jet. The plane descended rapidly. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling as debris flew through the cabin from a hole that had suddenly appeared in the floor.

It wasn’t until they were safely on the ground after an emergency landing that they realized how lucky they had been: a hole the size of a small car had been ripped into the Boeing 747-400′s metal skin and penetrated the fuselage.

The eerie scene aboard Flight QF 30, captured on a passenger’s cell phone video camera, showed a tense quiet punctuated only by a baby’s cries as passengers sat with oxygen masks on their faces. The jerky footage showed a woman holding tightly to the seat in front of her as rapidly approaching land appeared through a window. Loud applause and relieved laughter went up as the plane touched down.

There were no injuries and only a few cases of nausea, airline officials said. An official of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration said initial reports indicated no link to terrorism. Investigators appeared to be focusing on a structural problem.

“From the pictures that we’ve seen out of Manila during the course of the day, it would seem that one of the panels to the outer skin of the aircraft has literally come away from the rest of the fuselage,” Chris Yates, an aviation expert at Jane’s Aviation, told The Associated Press.

While it is not uncommon for metal panels to be lost from aircraft in flight, he said: “It’s relatively rare that when a bit falls off the airplane it causes the sort of instance that we saw in relation to Qantas. … It causes the aircraft cabin to depressurize.”

The passengers, on a flight from London to Melbourne, had just been served a meal after a stopover in Hong Kong when they described hearing a loud bang, then their ears popping as air rushed out the hole. The pilots put the plane into a quick descent to 10,000 feet, where the atmosphere is thin but breathable.

“One hour into the flight there was a big bang, then the plane started going down,” passenger Marina Scaffidi, 39, from Melbourne, said by phone from the airport. “There was wind swirling around the plane and some condensation.”

She said a hole extended from the cargo hold into the passenger cabin.

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