Details are emerging on how 142 passengers and 10 crew members of a Kenya Airways Boeing 787 Dreamliner escaped death after one of the plane’s engine caught fire.
The plane had taken off from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) headed to Johannesburg, South Africa.
The plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Dar er Salaam. The incident took place on February 12 this year.
“The crew shut down the engine as per procedure and diverted to Dar es Salaam. Our engineers travelled to Dar es Salaam to assess the engine and determined that it needed to be changed,” CEO Sebastian Mikosz said when the incident happened.
Daily Nation has, however, established that the problem was bigger than KQ portrayed by then and that the lives of 152 people on board were at great risk.
“An internal investigative report by the airline’s safety office says that the left engine caught fire, forcing the pilots to shut it down and ask for an emergency landing,” the paper reported.
The incident happened 26 days before the crash of Ethiopian Airlines737 MAX which killed all the 157 passengers on board.