Dramatic moment flames shoot from plane before emergency landing

Terrified passengers watched on as flames shot from a plane’s engine before it was forced to make an emergency landing.

Dramatic video captured the moment flames shot out of an engine on a flight in North America — leading one terrified passenger to think, “Damn, it’s gonna go down!”.

The Southwest Airlines flight from Texas was climbing out of William P. Hobby Airport in Houston en route to Cancun, Mexico on Tuesday evening, local time, when the right engine erupted in flames, local television station KHOU reported.

“All I know is it started swinging like left to right, and I thought, I’ve been on a lot of flights,” Flight 307 passenger Coale Kalisek told the outlet.

“I think I fly once or twice a month and I knew that wasn’t normal and so I opened up my window and I’m sitting next to the engine and that whole engine you see like fireballs coming out of it.”

The San Antonio man was headed to the Mexican resort with his girlfriend.

“I’m thinking damn, it’s gonna go down,” Mr Kalisek said.

A passenger aboard a Southwest Airlines flight from Houston to Cancun captured the video of an engine on fire. Picture: Ricardo Garcia / Twitter

The flight “returned to the airport to check out a potential mechanical issue. The aircraft landed safely and was taken out of service,” Southwest Airlines told KHOU.

“A different aircraft is being brought in to continue the flight to Cancun. We appreciate our Customers’ patience as we work to get them to their destinations as quickly as possible.”

But Mr Kalisek and his girlfriend decided to stay behind after the scary 27-minute flight — losing the thousands of dollars they paid for the trip, the outlet reported.

Instead, they rented a car and drove the 320km back to San Antonio.

A mechanical engineer was leaving work near the airport when he looked up and saw flames coming from the plane.

“I noticed big black plumes of smoke coming out the right engine and then it started shooting really big fireballs out and the plane was shifting back and forth, side to side, pretty heavily,” Andrew Sandino told NBC News.

“I was thinking this plane may crash. If that engine just completely explodes and sends shrapnel everywhere, the plane is going to fizzle out and hit the ground.”

This article originally appeared in New York Post and was reproduced with permission