In the early hours of this morning, an Edelweiss Airbus A340 operating a flight to Cape Town suffered an engine failure, forcing a return back to Zurich.
Incident: Edelweiss Flight WK84 Zurich-Cape Town Engine Failure…
Edelweiss flight WK84 is a routine scheduled flight between Zurich and Cape Town, with the affected rotation being operated by HB-JMF.
As per data from Planespotters.net, HB-JMF is a 20.1 year old Airbus A340-300 that was delivered originally to SWISS back in November 2003.
By March 2017, the aircraft was handed over to Edelweiss Air.
Of the Airbus A340-300 variant, Edelweiss has five of them, of which all of them were in active service before the incident occurred, offering an average fleet age of 20.2 years across all five.
Edelweiss flight WK84 departed Zurich at 2317 local time last night and proceeded southbound in the direction of Cape Town.
As per The Aviation Herald, upon reaching the Genoa area and climbing through FL320, the #3 engine onboard the Airbus A340 suffered issues, which prompted a descent to FL270 and a u-turn back to the Swiss airport.
HB-JMF subsequently landed safely into Zurich on it’s first attempt, and was met by fire crews on arrival.
The Cape Town-bound flight was observed to have had fire crews examining something near the right main landing gear.
It is understood also that the passengers had to spend the night in the terminal as there were no customs officials available too.
HB-JMF has been grounded since this incident in the early hours of this morning.
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