“I heard this huge bang, and [the man next to me] said, that’s our engine that’s just fallen off. I couldn’t believe it. He had to repeat it to me,” passenger Ronel Derma told the Independent News. A Nationwide Boeing 737 was taking off from South Africa’s Cape Town International Airport on Wednesday afternoon when the right-hand engine separated from the wing. “The aircraft returned and landed … without further incident,” the airline said. The landing was safe and none of the 106 passengers was hurt. “The plane started to shake a bit, but what was amazing was the staff and passengers, everybody was so calm,” said Derma. “There was no hysteria, no nothing, it was amazing.”
The runway was closed briefly while the debris was cleared away but then the airport operations returned to normal.
