Passengers evacuate onto plane’s wing after engine bursts into flames
Dramatic footage shows American Airlines passengers evacuating their plane after an engine burst into flames at Denver Airport.
Smoke can be seen billowing around the travellers as they flee the aircraft via one of the wings and the emergency slides yesterday afternoon.
The airline said all 172 passengers and six crew members made it off the Boeing 737-800 plane, with 12 needing hospital treatment for minor injuries.
Flight AA 1006 from Colorado Springs was diverted from its planned destination of Dallas after the crew reported vibrations coming from the engine.
Aaron Clark witnessed the drama from inside the terminal while waiting for his own flight.
He said: ‘We were near (gate) B44, just landed from Pittsburgh. We stopped by the windows for a second and saw a flash of sudden fire, followed by a ton of smoke.
‘The fire was very brief and looked like it was extinguished pretty quickly by ground crews.
‘The smoke continued for a while and that’s when we saw people starting to exit from the rear slides.’
The FAA said it would investigate the incident. A Denver International Airport spokesperson said the fire had been extinguished and flight operations had continued as normal.
The engine fire is the latest in a series of high-profile aviation incidents that have raised questions about US aviation safety.
The worst of those was the January 29 mid-air collision of an American Airlines regional jet and an Army helicopter that killed 67 people.
Last month, a Delta Air Lines regional jet flipped upside down upon landing at Canada’s Toronto Pearson Airport in windy weather following a snowstorm.
Some 18 of the 80 people on board were injured, but all passengers and crew members survived the incident.
American Airlines CEO Robert Isom and Delta CEO Ed Bastian cited recent air crashes and weather events as contributing factors to dampening US travel demand, alongside mounting economic uncertainty.
The emergency incident comes days after a small plane crashed into a retirement home car park in Pennsylvania and burst into flames.
Miraculously, all people involved in the crash survived. Five passengers on board the plane were hurt and taken to a hospital.
While everyone survived Denver Airport, we have already seen a spate of fatal plane crashes in the first months of 2025.
Two days after the Washington DC disaster, a medical plane crashed onto a residential street in Philadelphia. All people on board died, including a sick child.
The high-profile crash at the icy runway of Canada’s Toronto Pearson Airport in February left many asking whether flying is still safe and why there have been so many aviation incidents.
Rumours around the air traffic controllers and the FAA began swirling after the Washington DC crash, fuelled by the US President Donald Trump’s unfounded accusations blaming the department’s equality and diversity policies for the collision.
An investigation continues into the Washington DC tragedy, but the US National Transportation Safety Board has made an ‘urgent safety recommendation’ as part of its preliminary report, CNN reports.
The NTSB said there have been more than 15,000 ‘near miss events’ over the Reagan Airport between 2021 and 2024 alone where an aircraft has come less than 400 feet from each other.
It called for a helicopter ban near the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when two of its runways are being used, proposing an alternative chopper route elsewhere.
The Black Hawk helicopter pilots may not have heard the control tower, the early findings suggest. It means they might not have realised their altitude was higher than it should have been, taking it to the flightpath of the passenger plane.
It also found that one air traffic controller was working two positions on the night of the crash, which is thought to be normal practice in some circumstances such as when covering for breaks.
However, the preliminary report said one controller was handling two positions at 3.30pm, while the accident happened five hours later at about 8.50pm, according to CNN citing the report.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.