Passenger on flight: 'I thought it was a bomb'

David Delucia was settling back into his airplane seat and starting to relax on his way to a long-awaited vacation when a huge explosion and flash of light interrupted an in-flight announcement and put him in survival mode. The Boeing 777-200, headed from Denver to Honolulu on Saturday with 231 passengers and 10 crew aboard, suffered a catastrophic failure in its right engine and flames erupted under the wing as the plane began to lose altitude.

As Delucia and his wife prepared for the worst, people in this Denver suburb reacted in horror as huge pieces of the engine casing and chunks of fiberglass rained down on a sports fields and on streets and lawns, just missing one home and crushing a truck. The explosion, visible from the ground, left a trail of black smoke in the sky, and tiny pieces of insulation filled the air like ash.

The plane landed safely at Denver International Airport, and no one on board or on the ground was hurt, authorities said. But both those in the air and on the ground were deeply shaken. "I really thought it was a bomb on the plane," said Simona Delucia, a nurse who says she immediately told husband David and friends Karla and Jeff Whichard to stuff their wallets in their pockets so they could be easily identified if the plane went down.

The group, a total of 6, were traveling from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and excited for vacation. "All I kept thinking is, 'this couldn't be my time.' I have a son that, unfortunately, was in the shooting on Parkland three years ago on February 14, and I couldn't think like he won't be able to survive this, losing mom and dad together at one time," Karla Whichard told The Associated Press.

Whichard says she the 20 minutes it took the pilot and crew to get them down safely were some of the longest of her life. "I was just praying, and I was like, 'This cannot be it.' I was in disbelief that all this vacation that we had been planning for months and my life would be ending like that," she said.

The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that the airplane experienced a right-engine failure shortly after takeoff. Video posted on Twitter showed the engine fully engulfed in flames as the plane flew through the air. Freeze frames from different video taken by a passenger sitting slightly in front of the engine and posted on Twitter appeared to show a broken fan blade in the engine.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Authorities have not released any details about what may have caused the failure. United said in a separate statement that most passengers on United Flight 328 were rebooked on a new flight to Hawaii, but some chose to stay in a hotel overnight instead.

Based on initial photos and videos posted by passengers, aviation safety experts said the plane appeared to have suffered an uncontained and catastrophic engine failure. Such an event is extremely rare and happens when huge spinning pieces inside the engine suffer some sort of failure and breach an armored casing around the engine that is designed to contain the damage, said John Cox, an aviation safety expert and retired airline pilot who runs an aviation safety consulting firm called Safety Operating Systems. Pilots practice how to deal with such an event frequently and would have immediately shut off anything flammable in the engine, including fuel and hydraulic fluid, using a single switch, Cox said.