A Boeing 777 of the Russian company Rossiya had to make an emergency landing on Friday (26) in Moscow after an engine problem, less than a week after a major incident with a similar plane in the United States.
“During cargo flight 4520, from Hong Kong to Madrid, an engine control sensor malfunction was detected,” he told the airline in a statement. “The crew decided to make an emergency landing in Moscow,” the note added.
“The landing went smoothly. The plane will resume its flight to Madrid after 12 noon (6 am in Brasilia),” said Rossiya, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned company Aeroflot.
Specialized websites confirmed that the aircraft was a Boeing 777-300ER.
Rossiya told AFP that all of its Boeing 777-300ERs are powered by GE90 engines from U.S. manufacturer General Electric, a different model from the one involved in last week’s crash in the United States.
On Saturday (20), the right engine of a Boeing 777 that was traveling from Denver (Colorado, United States) to Honolulu (Hawaii), with 231 passengers and 10 crew members, suffered a fire shortly after takeoff, this which forced the pilots must return immediately to the departure airport. No one was injured and the plane managed to land.
The wreckage, however, fell near houses in town, and scenes of the plane flying even with one of the engines on fire drew attention.
The other case occurred in the Netherlands on Sunday (21), with a Boeing 747-400 freighter that dropped engine parts after an explosion in the air and a fire shortly after take-off. The Longtail Aviation plane sprayed small pieces of metal over the southern town of Meerssen, causing property damage and injuring a woman.
The plane, which was bound for New York, was fitted with Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines, but in a smaller version of the equipment used on the Denver flight. The plane landed safely at Liège Airport in Belgium, about 30 kilometers south of the Dutch border.
After the incidents, more than 120 Boeing 777s with Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines stopped flying around the world, until safety reviews were carried out.
This week’s incidents are another headache for the company after the 737 crisis. In 2018, a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX plane took off from Indonesia’s Jakarta Airport with 189 people on board. Twelve minutes later, the plane crashed in the Java Sea, north of the capital, leaving no survivors.
The crash was the first involving the newly launched aircraft, the latest generation of the best-selling model in history. Since then, a second drop in similar circumstances brought the death toll in crashes involving MAX to 346, which had flights suspended in March 2019.
The ban lasted 22 months until in November the FAA (US Airline Regulator) authorized the resumption of flights with the 737 MAX. A few days after the US approval, Anac (National Civil Aviation Agency) also approved the resumption of operation of the model in Brazil.