All passengers and crew aboard the Emirates aircraft were evacuated minutes after crash landing in Dubai.
Emirates suffered the worst incident in its 30-year history when a Boeing 777-300 arriving from India crash-landed in Dubai before bursting into flames, with all people on board escaping unharmed.
A firefighter was killed trying to extinguish the blaze on Flight 521 from Thiruvananthapuram, India, Emirates Chairman Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, said at an evening news conference Wednesday in Dubai.
The trouble with the flight was "operational," he said. "In terms of security issue at this stage, I don't think so." The pilot might have tried to change his flight pattern to avoid wind shear, but that hadn't been verified, Sheikh Ahmed said. The pilot and co-pilot had logged more than 7,000 of flying hours each, he said.
"It's difficult to speculate about what happened in the last few minutes of the flight, but I want to thank the crew for their professionalism and evacuating the plane in a short time," he said.
Television footage and newswire photos showed the aircraft slid to a halt on its belly, with one of its huge Rolls-Royce engines detached. The jet then quickly became engulfed in smoke and fire, gutting the length of the fuselage and burning off the roof. Emirates said via Twitter that 282 passengers and 18 crew members were on board.
Emergency services sprayed down the plane to put out the fire. Passengers and crew hurried to safety down inflatable slides. Dubai airport shut down shortly after the 12:45 p.m. crash and reopened at 6:30 p.m. on a restricted basis, giving priority to arriving flights.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is sending a five-person team to assist with the investigation, spokesman Eric Weiss said. Under a United Nations treaty, the government from where the plane was manufactured is invited to participate in a probe.
The wreck marks the worst accident for Emirates, the world's biggest carrier by international traffic. The incident temporarily halted all flights at its Dubai International base, the world's third-busiest airport by passenger numbers.
Boeing's 777 model is the largest twin-engine airliner in production and the most used wide-body. Emirates is the biggest operator of the plane as well as of Airbus Group SE's A380 double-decker. The Boeing aircraft is also one of the safest, with only a handful suffering irreparable damage since the model's introduction two decades ago, including incidents caused by war or pilot error, according to Aviation Safety Network.
Boeing is standing by with a technical team to help U.S. authorities investigating the accident, the U.S. planemaker said on its website. Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc, which made the jet's Trent 800 engines, also said it was ready to take part in the probe.
The aircraft involved entered service in March 2003. The 3 1/2-hour flight started midmorning from Thiruvananthapuram on India's southwest coast. Emirates serves the region mainly to ferry Indian workers to jobs in the Middle East.
The worldwide 777 fleet totals 1,335 planes. Incidents in the past decade that involved the aircraft's destruction include:
- September 2015: A British Airways 777 caught fire while beginning takeoff from Las Vegas for London; all 157 passengers and 13 crew evacuated safely. That incident was blamed on an engine fault.
- July 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, with 298 people on board on its way to from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was brought down over Ukraine by a missile fired from the eastern part of the country, Dutch investigators concluded.
- March 2014: Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 aboard, disappeared from radar over southeast Asia. While pieces of the plane have since been found along Indian Ocean coastlines, the hull has never been located
- July 2013: An Asiana Airlines Inc. plane flying from Seoul crashed while landing in San Francisco, resulting in two deaths. Investigators cited pilot error and cockpit design as contributing to the accident.
- July 2011: An EgyptAir plane at the departure gate at Cairo's international airport for a flight to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was heavily damaged by a fire blamed on an electrical fault in the cockpit. All 291 people aboard escaped.
- January 2008: A British Airways 777 from Beijing crashed on landing at London's Heathrow airport after losing power from both engines. Investigators said low midflight temperatures probably reduced fuel flow
Emirates has built its business on exploiting the Persian Gulf's position at the heart of intercontinental flight paths and the region's oil industry, building Dubai into an airport that served 78 million passengers last year, making the hub the world's biggest by international traffic. The carrier's success has put pressure on earnings at European network airlines including Air France-KLM Group and Deutsche Lufthansa.
© 2016 Bloomberg L.P.
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