A Qantas 747 Jumbo Jet carrying 350 people made an emergency landing in the Philippines today after the fuselage was ripped open at 30,000 feet, sucking air pressure out of the cabin. The Boeing 747-400 jet took off after a stop in Hong Kong an hour earlier en route from London to Melbourne. Terrified passengers described hearing a loud bang before air and debris rushed through the cabin and the plane "dropped suddenly" as the pilot made an emergency descent to Manila.One of the shaken passengers said, "There was wood and newspapers flying past me and a woman who I was talking to in first class, and then oxygen masks fell down. The moment it happened I thought we were going to plunge to our deaths."
Another passenger, Brendan McClements, said, "We were flying out of Hong Kong, I heard a very loud noise, a bang. There was a sort of rapid expulsion of wind. It went out of the plane, the air got sucked out, the oxygen masks dropped down and we put them on." Another passenger said children burst into tears after the "quick bang" reverberated throughout the cabin and the plane plunged.
Once on the ground, passengers could see a gash running several yards down the side of the fuselage. Octavio Lina, a Manila airport operations manager, said parts of the plane's floor collapsed, revealing cargo underneath. "Upon disembarkation there were some passengers who vomited. You can see in their faces that they were really scared," he said. One passenger praised the pilot, saying he had done an "amazing job" of controlling the aircraft and bringing it down safely. Qantas boasts of its safety record, having never lost a jet to an accident. (AP)
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