Nearly 500 Singapore Airlines passengers arrived safely yesterday after their Airbus A380 superjumbo was forced to make an emergency landing in Azerbaijan.
“It was quite frightening,” Chris Milbourn, an 18-year-old student from Australia, told AFP after getting off a replacement A380 that ferried them from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to Singapore. “I was calm... but there will be like moments here and there when you just think ‘I am about to die’,” he said.
The relief jet touched down at Changi Airport more than 34 hours after a loss of cabin pressure forced the original plane to land in Baku while en route from London’s Heathrow Airport to Singapore. The original flight carrying 467 passengers and 27 crew had to make a steep descent to Baku’s Heydar Aliyev International Airport late Monday night, but no one was injured. Oxygen masks were activated during the emergency procedure and passengers spoke of noise coming from one door as the aircraft manoeuvered to land, but said there was little panic inside the A380, the world’s largest commercial plane. Jessica Copeland, 26, a waitress from Australia who was seated in the upper part of the double-decker plane, said seeing other passengers behaving calmly “really helped me”. “I thought we were going completely down,” she said. Ashley Li, 28, a Singaporean returning from her honeymoon, said she was “a bit shocked” when the oxygen masks dropped in the cabin but “there was no turbulence” as the plane descended towards Baku.