VIDEO: Plane engine cover falls apart in mid-air

If you’re a nervous flyer, you may want to look away now. Passengers on board a plane which made an emergency landing after one of its engines fell apart in mid-air have shared hair-raising images and video of the disintegrating engine.

United Airlines flight UA1175 from San Francisco was passing over the Pacific Ocean en route to Honolulu when the right-hand engine lost a large part of its cowling, the aluminium shell which covers the inner components.

“There was a loud bang… and then the plane really started shaking,” passenger Allison Sudiacal told NBC News affiliate KHNL.

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The twin-engined Boeing 777 was around half an hour from its destination when the incident occurred. After the pilot alerted ground staff to the issue, the plane made an emergency landing on schedule at Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport.

Photos taken by passengers show exposed metal and wiring surrounded by tattered flaps of the damaged covering.

One woman on board later tweeted that the incident was “the scariest flight of my life”.

Erik Haddad, a Google engineer travelling on the flight, filmed the stricken engine shaking and rattling in the wind.

However, he was able to keep his cool, even venturing a joke:

Emergency services were waiting at the runway as a precaution, but the plane was able to land safely, with no injuries to passengers.

United Airlines confirmed that the flight had been cleared for an emergency landing at Honolulu airport due to a “mechanical fault”.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board have announced that they will be launching an investigation into the incident, NBC News reports.

It has not yet been established whether the damage to the engine was superficial or more substantial.

Although passengers’ alarm in the face of an apparently disintegrating engine is understanding, “it should be noted that the Boeing 777 is designed to fly on a single engine,” Business Insider reports.