Video purportedly showed a tower of flame bursting from the front of the aircraft, and then a thick black plume of smoke rising into the sky.
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Air Emirates flight from Thiruvananthapuram to Dubai International Airport caught fire on Wednesday, August 3,2016.
All passengers on board the plane coming from India were evacuated safely, the government said earlier, as footage on social media showed smoke billowing from the aircraft.
The area near the aircraft was also cordoned off, and all arrivals and departures from Dubai’s worldwide airport were temporarily suspended.
Airline chairman Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum said in a statement the flight had been involved in an “incident”.
Dubai (DXB) is now the busiest worldwide airport for global passengers.
Dubai International Airport services about 78 million passengers annually, making it the third-busiest airport worldwide in overall passenger traffic and the busiest in terms of the volume of international passengers, according to Airports Council International.
It confirmed that “all passengers and crew are accounted for and safe”, but gave no details of what went wrong. These included 11 Emiratis, 226 from India and 24 Britons.
He said the first priority is obviously the passengers’ welfare and that of the crew, with the emergency centre fully activated if needed.
As Dubai is a major worldwide hub for flights to the Indian Ocean and Australasia, this incident is also likely to cause disruption to long-haul flights to and from the UK.
“Many of them are in shock after such an event, and there may be minor bruises”, he said.
The accident happened as Flight EK521, a Boeing 777, was arriving from the southern Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram. All 300 passengers and crew on board the Boeing 777 were safely evacuated, but the airport suspended all arrivals and departures during the afternoon.
The airline said it expected a 4-hour network-wide delay for its operations.
Hundreds of thousands of Kerala residents work in the Gulf countries.
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The incident was the most serious to date for Emirates, it being the only loss for the airline since it started operations in 1985.
