Airplane leaving JWA makes emergency landing

June Casagrande

An early morning flight out of John Wayne Airport was forced to

make an emergency stop at Los Angeles International Airport on

Tuesday after one of the plane’s two engines failed.

Delta Flight 138 to Atlanta was declared to be in a state of

emergency after the pilot reported that one of the Boeing 757’s

engines had failed shortly after takeoff from John Wayne at 8:45 a.m.

The plane landed safely at LAX shortly after 9 a.m. None of the 167

passengers was injured.

“We don’t yet know what caused the engine to fail,” said Anthony

Black, a Delta Airlines spokesman. “We will look into it to see what

the cause was. It would be premature at this point to say that the

cause of the problem was mechanical.”

The airline rebooked all the passengers to their final

destinations.

Information about the plane, including the year it was built, was

not immediately available, Black said. Delta does not release the

names of passengers in incidents such as the one Tuesday morning, and

it is unknown how many of the people aboard Delta Flight 138 are

Newport-Mesa residents.

An indicator light on the plane’s instrument panel was probably

what alerted the pilot to the problem, Black said.

John Wayne traffic was unaffected by the incident, airport

spokeswoman Ann McCarley said.

“There were no other impacts on airport operations. All other

flights are running as scheduled,” McCarley said.

Delta has 17 flights a day from John Wayne Airport to its various

destinations.