Passenger Saw Fire on Engine of Qantas Flight

A Qantas Boeing 747 with 431 people on board landed safely in Singapore late Friday after an engine caught fire minutes after it took off from the city-state, the airline and a passenger said.

The problem arose just a day after a Qantas Airbus A380 superjumbo jet made an emergency landing at the same airport due to an engine blowout.

"There was a loud bang and a jet of fire from the back of the engine," Andrew Jenkins, a 43-year-old Briton who was on his way to Australia on a holiday, told The Associated Press.

Jenkins, who was sitting in seat 62A at the back of the plane on the left side, said he could see the engine clearly. The blast happened "one or two minutes" into the flight when the plane had climbed about 2,000 feet, according to Jenkins, who said he used to fly a two-seater plane.

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After the Airbus A380 emergency landing Thursday, Qantas grounded its fleet of A380s and other airlines made checks of their planes that have the same Rolls-Royce engine. The A380 shed debris from the busted engine onto the thickly populated Indonesian island of Batam.

Earlier, Qantas said the engine blowout on its Airbus superjumbo was likely caused by material failure or faulty design, as passengers from the stricken plane left Friday for Australia on a relief flight.

CBS News correspondent Celia Hatton reports that Qantas has never had a fatal accident in its 90 year history. There has never been a fatality involving an Airbus A380, and the engine failure is the most serious incident involving that type of aircraft since the model went into service in October 2007.