A KENDAL couple have relived a ‘nightmare’ flight when an engine fire forced a Qantas jet to make an emergency landing in Singapore.

Shirley and Ian Williams were in the early stages of a ‘holiday of a lifetime’ to Australia when the terr-ifying incident happened.

The couple, of Lowther Park, said other passen-gers began to scream after they heard a bang and saw flames coming out of the Boeing 747-400’s engine minutes after the flight QF006 took off from Changi airport.

The captain was forced to turn back and make an emergency landing after dumping fuel.

“We were told to brace ourselves for an emergency landing. I felt total fear,” said Mrs Williams, 46. “I thought: ‘God almighty! I really was scared to death.”

“We had only been in the air six minutes when the bang happened. We were on the right side of the plane and the engine was on the left so we didn’t see what the other passengers saw.

“We knew something serious had happened when we heard some of them screaming.

“The captain announced that there was problem with one engine but the other three were running normally.”

The emergency took place a day after an Airbus A380 operated by the Australian flag carrier made a dramatic emergency landing in Singapore following an engine failure minutes after taking off on a flight to Sydney.

In that incident, a part inside the engine came off, damaging a wing.

The Williams’s flight took off at 8.17pm on November 5 but was forced to return to Changi afer circling for 25 minutes dumping fuel in readiness for an emergency landing.

There were 412 passengers on board, along with three flight crew and 16 cabin crew.

Mrs Williams, 46, a checkout assistant at Asda, said: “Fortunately, I was sitting next to a Qantas stewardess who had been working on the previous day’s flight.

"She was on the flight with two of her colleagues and she was able to keep me informed about what was happening. She made me feel calmer.”

Mrs Williams and her 53-year-old husband, a process worker, were put up in a luxury Singapore hotel for two nights until a flight was arranged to take them on to Sydney so they could resume their holiday.

They returned to Kendal last Thursday.