Hong Kong:
Qantas Airways said on Thursday that it is suspending all flights of its Airbus A380 jetliners after an engine failure earlier in the day forced a flight to make an emergency landing in Singapore.
(See Pictures)Alan Joyce, Qantas's chief executive, said the Australian airline would suspend services on its A380 fleet "until we are confident that Qantas safety requirements have been met," according to a statement on the airline's Website.
Mr Joyce said the suspension of the six planes would remain until his company was satisfied with the safety of its A380's.
The announced suspension came after one of Qantas's A380 planes, bound for Sydney, returned to Singapore and made an emergency landing after one of its four engines shut down over western Indonesia. One of the A380's four engines, the No 2 engine, shut down during the flight, said a Qantas spokeswoman, Emma Kearns, in Sydney.
The Qantas spokeswoman said the flight was carrying 433 passengers and 26 crew.
There were no immediate reports of injuries, the Australian government said.
The airline rejected initial media reports of an explosion aboard the jetliner.
"The aircraft landed safely at 11:45 am local time," Qantas said in a statement. "Some media reports suggested the aircraft had crashed. These reports are incorrect. No Qantas aircraft has crashed."
The Associated Press, however, cited a passenger aboard the flight who said she heard two bangs and saw flames from her window.
"There was flames -- yellow flames came out, and debris came off. You could see black things shooting through the smoke, like bits of debris," Rosemary Hegardy, 60, of Sydney told the AP.
An Indonesian television station reported that debris from the flight had fallen in western Indonesia. MetroTV said witnesses on the western Indonesian island of Batam heard a large blast and saw pieces of debris falling on to houses and a nearby shopping mall, the Associated Press reported.
"I heard a big explosion at around 9:15 am and saw a commercial passenger plane flying low in the distance with smoke on one of its wings," Rusdi, a local resident, told MetroTV, the AP reported. (Many Indonesians go by only one name.)
Singapore Airlines said on Thursday that it would not ground its fleet of A380 planes but would closely monitor the situation.
The emergency landing on Thursday was the latest in reported plane malfunctions this year for Qantas.
In late March, a Qantas Boeing 747 bound for Singapore was forced to return to Sydney after one of the plane's pilots reported mechanical problems that affected one of the plane's engines, according to Australian media. And on March 31, the airline reported a brake locked up as an A380 landed in Sydney, causing two of the plane's tires to blow out.
On August 31, the airline reported a "catastrophic failure" in an engine of a 747 flying from San Francisco to Sydney, according to The Australian newspaper. The jetliner safely returned to San Francisco.