High drama: Twilight actor tweets of plane engine explosion before emergency landing
Actor Jackson Rathbone, best known for his role as a vampire in the “Twilight” films, said in a series of Twitter posts that he had been on a plane that made an emergency landing "after an engine exploded".
A Long Beach airport spokeswoman said that four people were injured in the incident on Thursday when a JetBlue plane carrying 147 people made an emergency landing "because of an engine issue"
Rathbonewho was with his wife and son, tweeted as soon as the plane landed, chronicling what happened and his feelings after the close call.
“Our right engine exploded and our cabin filled with smoke,”he said in one tweet.
“The oxygen masks did not deploy, but the brave stewardesses came around and manually deployed them,” Rathbone said in another tweet.
“It was rough, the plane was rocking.”
Rathbone said that once the plane was on the ground, the family jumped down the ramp.
I grabbed my son and jumped down the inflated ramp, my wife following.
We left all our personal effects onboard. Who cares. We were alive.
We're safe. I'm grateful.
Here's one of our sweet stewardesses who pried open our oxygen masks
JetBlue Flight 1416, which had just departed for Austin, Texas, returned to Long Beach after pilots got an overheating warning for one of the engines, Long Beach Airport spokeswoman Stephanie Montuya-Morisky said.
She said all 142 passengers were evacuated from the plane by slides after it landed at 9.30 am onThursday (12.30am Friday Singapore time).
Four passengers were treated at the scene for minor injuries and one of them was taken to a hospital, she said.
JetBlue said in a statement that the flight returned to Long Beach Airport after the crew reported an issue with the No. 2 engine.
The statement said the plane landed safely. The airline said no injuries were reported at the time.
A runway was shut down at the airport, about 40km south of Los Angeles, while passengers were removed from the disabled plane, but was reopened about two hours later.
Source: Reuters, Twitter, whosay.com, YouTube/scottfwelch
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