TWA Jet Makes Forced Landing as Engine Fails

A TWA jumbo jet en route to Copenhagen turned back to London and made an emergency landing Monday because one of its four Pratt & Whitney engines failed in flight, officials said.

Fire engines and ambulances lined the runway at Heathrow Airport as TWA Flight 754 with 94 passengers on board landed safely.

The plane had arrived earlier from Boston with 309 passengers.

It had just taken off when the outer left engine failed.

The plane’s pilot, Capt. Donald K. Stitt, said the problem had been caused by the failure of one of the turbines in the JT9D engines.

As he examined the engine on the ground at Heathrow, he said: “One of the turbines broke up and there are a lot of pieces of metal inside the engine.”

Stitt said that soon after takeoff, “there was a loud bang and I shut down the engine. I did one circuit of the airport and came straight back in.”

A passenger, Harvey Webb of Seal Island, Calif., said: “There was an explosion from the No. 1 engine and a lot of flames . . . it was several seconds before it died down. . . . There was no panic.”

On Aug. 22, a Pratt & Whitney JT8D-15 engine on a British Airtours Boeing 737 exploded as the plane was about to take off from Manchester Airport, killing 55 persons aboard.

Investigators of last Friday’s crash of a Midwest Airlines DC-9 that killed all 31 persons aboard in Milwaukee have determined that the plane’s right engine, a Pratt & Whitney JT8D-7, was not producing power at the time of the crash.