Truemors
London to Melbourne flight QF30 had to make an emergency landing after a 4-metre hole opened up in the fuselage.
The Boeing 747 had just taken off from a stopover in Hong Kong, when the cabin suffered an explosive decompression. As passengers panicked to put on their oxygen masks, the pilot began an emergency descent, dropping the plane from 30,00ft to 10,000.
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 aircraft landed safely in Manila, with all 346 passengers and 19 crew able to disembark normally, with no reported injuries to either passengers or crew.
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."
Qantas is now investigating the cause of this event, but this is the most recent in a line of accidents that have befallen the airline.
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.
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