Jet Carrying 90 Lands in San Diego Minus 1 Engine

An American Airlines Boeing 727 jet with 90 people aboard landed safely Tuesday after one of its three engines fell off during a flight here from Dallas.

The pilot and crew of Flight 199 knew one of the engines had failed, but they were unaware it had fallen off the plane, said American Airlines spokesman Joe Stroop.

“We don’t know why this happened, but we sure intend to find out,” Stroop said. “We’re conducting a full investigation.”

The non-stop flight from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to San Diego’s Lindbergh Field landed safely at about noon. The jet was flying under Alert 1 status, meaning it was having minor difficulty, said Buck Jones, assistant manager at Lindbergh.

‘Felt a Shudder’

“About 45 minutes out (of San Diego), the captain radioed ground control that he had felt a shudder and that indicators in the cockpit showed that one of the engines had seized,” or stopped, Stroop said from the airline’s headquarters in Grapevine, Tex.

“The captain went through the normal procedure to cut power to that engine and the airplane continued to function normally in all respects. In the captain’s judgment, it was safe to continue on to San Diego,” he said.

The engine apparently dislodged in western Arizona, somewhere near Tucson, Stroop said. He did not know the weight of the engine but said it was “pretty big.”

A Boeing 727 has all three engines mounted on the tail.

The captain told passengers there was an engine problem, but nobody on the plane knew the engine was gone, Stroop said.

“Even without the power from the third engine, it was a normal landing,” he said, and the engine was not discovered to be missing until the crew inspected the plane after it landed.