A Southwest Airlines flight between Denver and Austin suffered an engine failure a few minutes after takeoff.
Incident: Southwest Flight Denver to Austin Suffers Engine Trouble…
N961WN was the Boeing 737-700 that operated this flight between the Colorado-based airport and Austin.
As per data from Planespotters.net, the aircraft is 12.1 years old at the time of writing, having been delivered to Southwest in July 2011.
Of its 814 aircraft in the fleet, around 405 of them are the -700 variant, with an average age of 18.3 years old, with 384 active and 21 parked.
The incident occurred yesterday when Southwest flight WN856 departed Denver at 0517 local time.
As per RadarBox data, the aircraft climbed up to 13,000 feet before doing a u-turn back to the airport amid reports of an engine failure.
WN856 then proceeded to descend back into the airport, where it landed safely around 25 minutes after its initial departure.
The jet taxied back to the gate on its arrival back into Denver.
It is unclear what the nature of the engine failure was caused by, but RadarBox data shows that the aircraft has been back in the air since the incident.
The jet departed again this morning operating the same flight, before continuing on to Minneapolis and Chicago also.
Such an issue on the engine would have been a minor fix by engineers in that case, especially if the aircraft is back in the air already and operating multiple sectors.
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