Qantas grounds fleet of world’s largest jets

An A380 had to return to a Singapore airport after part of one of its engines broke off.

Capable of carrying 440 passengers, the A380 is the biggest passenger plane in the skies. Yesterday, shortly after a Qantas A380 took off from Singapore, passengers heard a loud bang and saw yellow flames coming out of one the jet’s four engines. The plane can fly with three engines, but the pilot took it back to the airport as a precaution, and found that the engine casing had fallen off. No passengers were hurt. Reportedly debris from the plane fell on a residential neighbourhood on an Indonesian island. Qantas announced it is grounding all six of its A380s indefinitely, but Singapore Airlines, which operates an 11-jet fleet of A380s, said it has no intention of doing the same.