Narrow escape for Qantas flight (updated)

Debra Manchester, a passenger in first class, said there was a "huge bang" and a "massive rush of wind," with debris swirling around the cabin. Mrs Manchester, a housewife from Buckinghamshire, said there was an atmosphere of chaos as passengers struggled to put their oxygen masks on.

"Newspapers and what looked like part of the ceiling flew past me. We didn't know what was happening to the plane. After a while things calmed down and there was a deadly silence. There was still debris all around our feet but we all started to feel a bit safer when we could take our masks off," she said.

The passengers praised the actions of the pilot and crew. Mr McClements, 45, said: "The crew were terrific, they were really good, they kept everyone calm and told people what to do and helped people with their masks and things. Their reactions had a very calm effect on the other passengers.

"When the crew came off everyone applauded and when the pilot came off he got a round of applause too.

"The pilot said to us: ‘Look, we don’t really know what happened. There is a hole in the side of the plane and the cabin depressurised so we had to come down.’”

Peter Gibson, from Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority, told ABC Radio that initial reports indicated a problem with air pressure in the cabin.

He said: "The pilot has some pressurisation warnings about a door on the left-hand side of the aircraft, but exactly what went wrong is still being determined."

March 30, 2008:  A cracked window forced a Boeing 747 from Perth to Sydney to make an unscheduled stop in Adelaide after the window ‘popped’. No-one was injured

March 26, 2008:  Qantas Flight 12 from Los Angeles to Sydney had to be stopped mid take-off following a ‘cockpit alert’. Many of the 217 passengers were thrown forward, but no-one was injured.

February 20, 2008:  Three of four electrical systems on a Qantas Boeing 747 approaching Bangkok from London were lost due to water leakage in the forward galley. Cabin crew used blankets to mop up the leak, and the jumbo was forced to land on battery back-up.

October, 2004:  A Qantas jet suffered engine failure shortly after take-off from Sydney airport. Smoke was seen belching from an engine after the 747 levelled out a few minutes into the flight. The pilot was forced to head out to sea to dump fuel before making an emergency landing.

July, 2003:  Qantas passengers were injured after hundreds were ordered on to inflatable escape chutes to evacuate a jumbo jet the pilot feared had caught fire as it landed at Sydney airport from Frankfurt and Singapore.

1999:  A Qantas plane aquaplaned off the end of the runway at Bangkok airport, crashing through navigational equipment and finishing across a perimeter road. The crash was the airline’s worst in 40 years and caused $A100million damage.

Although there has been no immediate evidence that terrorism played a part in the incident, investigators will want to look at anything that points towards a deliberately-planted explosive device.

The probe will also concentrate on whether there was a non-criminal explosion of some kind or whether the incident was sparked by something breaking on the plane.

"It should become apparent fairly quickly if something exploded or something broke," said Kieran Daly, editor of internet news service Air Transport Intelligence.

"When things like this happens there is always the thought that it might be a criminal case. Investigators will also want to see if something like a gas cylinder exploded or that something broke for whatever reason.

"There may also have been some form of structural failure. Sometimes with accidents, the essential gist of the cause is very quickly known, but then it can take a much longer period of time to know exactly what happened."