Fourteen people were admitted to hospital.
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There were no New Zealanders on board the flight.
“What I think is a really positive thing to come out of this, is that the cabin crew, and of course helped by the flight crew, managed to get all of those 300 people off that aeroplane apparently without anybody being killed”, he said.
The exact circumstances of the landing and fire have yet to be confirmed.
Pictures from the scene show the Boeing 777 billowing smoke then erupting into flame as it sits on the tarmac, just moments after all 300 passengers and crew escaped from the cabin.
“It was actually really terrifying”.
“It was a big noise”, said Shadi Kochuktty, a passenger from India.
“Everything was very much clear to land”, he said.
They said they were ordered to evacuate by jumping on inflatable slides.
The Boeing 777 flew out of the southern Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram.
Another passenger, Sai Bhaskar, said the flight landed with the right wing touching the runway.
Emirates Airlines flight EK521 from Thiruvananthapuram, India crash landed at Dubai International Airport earlier last night, the BBC reports. Airport authorities halted all operations at Dubai International until further notice, Dubai Airports said on Twitter.
The aircraft with registration A6-EMW powered by two Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engines and was delivered to Emirates in March 2003. The government-backed airline has a good safety record, with no other major accidents recorded since its founding in 1985. It is the first time an aircraft operated by Emirates has been damaged beyond fix since the carrier was founded in the 1980s. Emirates said it had “no further information on what may have caused the accident”.
Dubai International is the world’s largest hub in terms of international passengers and is the base for Emirates, from where it serves more than 153 destinations. It handled some 78 million passengers past year.
The airline’s chair and chief executive, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, said: “We pay tribute to the firefighter who lost his life fighting the blaze”.
He said The Emirati captain and Australian co-pilot each had nearly 7000 hours flying experience and that the aircraft was up to date with safety checks.
He also told reporters the crash was not caused by any breach of security, but added that authorities were still investigating the incident. “The idea is that you have to be able to evacuate an aircraft within 90 seconds if there is an accident on the ground”, said Quest.
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Investigators will scour the wreckage and interview pilots, controllers and witnesses for clues to any technical malfunctions, human error or weather-related problems.
