BALTIMORE — An engine failure caused pieces of a United flight to land in homes just minutes after takeoff.
One of the people on the plane flew out of Baltimore and was connecting in Denver heading to Honolulu.
Dozens of Boeing 777 aircraft are now grounded because of this jet failure on Saturday.
As for Marc Marcel, he wasn’t going to miss his opportunity to perform spoken word in Hawaii.
He hopped on a flight four hours after the plane was grounded and made it to Hawaii.
“I’m alright, I’m alright now,” Marcel said on his Instagram video.
The lead up to this Instagram video from Baltimore Native Marc Marcel was intense, terrifying and chaotic.
We talked to Marcel from his hotel room in Hawaii.
“We were just hitting the clouds, and all of a sudden you heard a boom,” said Marcel. “It didn’t feel like anything hit the plane which was weird. When you hear a noise like that you are like what did the plane hit. It didn’t feel like nothing hit the plane.”
The US National Transportation Safety Board found that two fan blades were fractured, sending prices of the plane spiraling into peoples yards.
People on the other side of the aisle took videos of the exposed flaming engine.
“I was like man they need to land this thing, what are they doing. As soon as I said that the pilot got on the intercom and said “we’re waiting in air traffic control to see what they want us to do. I’m like waiting on air traffic controller to see what they want you to do! Land this thing now.”
The pilot came back on and the plane turned around.
“It felt like the plane was going to rip apart. I’ve never been on a plane that shook like that.”
Marcel is a spoken word artist— his thoughts were all over and he says he had made his peace this might be the end.
“I thought about my family and I thought about my art. I was like man I have to completed albums that I haven’t released and they are up in the overhead on my laptop. If something happens to this plane it’s going to disintegrate and no ones ever going to hear that. I’m like man how can I upload these things to the cloud real quick!”
Thankfully, it was a relatively smooth landing. Then they waited in the tarmac for 45 minutes when Marcel started his Instagram video.
“They are going to tug us back in like the planes done. Done. Oh my god yo.”
He made it in time to prepare for his show, and says he will definitely have some NEW material to add.
“I don’t know if I’ll write a poem, maybe specially about this. I may incorporate it into appreciating how valuable life is and how it can be gone in a second.”
This is an ongoing investigation and in the meantime United says it should only affect a small number of customers.
No one was hurt during the incident and Marcel's show is scheduled for Friday night.
