An early Wednesday Seaborne Airlines flight bound from St. Thomas to St. Croix experienced engine trouble halfway between the two islands but was able to safely land at Henry E. Rohlsen Airport.
The Seaborne Airlines shuttle, carrying seven passengers, took off from Cyril E. King airport around 7:50 a.m. for Rohlsen Airport. Halfway into the 20-minute flight, the twin-engine Twin Otter experienced a one-engine shut down, Seaborne’s president Omer ErSelcuk said in a telephone interview Thursday.
The aircraft was able to safely continue on to land at Rohlsen on the remaining engine.
While passengers were likely shaken, no one aboard the 17-passenger, two- crew plane was injured in the incident, ErSelcuk said.
“The crew followed the standard procedure,” ErSelcuk said. “It’s not what we like to have happen, but this is what we train for.”
Seaborne sends its crews for flight safety training in Toronto, where crews experience situations in actual planes and simulators.
“One thing that we train for over and over and over again is an engine-out procedure, ErSelcuk said.
The Twin Otter is design to fly safely on one engine, ErSelcuk said. He estimated the craft’s age at around 20 years and said that the plane had been in the Seaborne fleet for a few months.
Causes for the engine failure are still under investigation, and both the Federal Aviation Administration and the company from which the aircraft is leased were notified immediately, ErSelcuk said.
The affected engine will be sent back to the mainland for investigation, and the plane is already being refitted with a replacement engine so the aircraft can get back into service for what ErSelcuk anticipates will be a busy weekend – weather permitting.
Seaborne monitors engine performance during every flight, logging readings, which are then transferred to another company for review.
“We look at [the statistics] weekly if not daily,” ErSelcuk said. Explaining that the data allows crews to monitor trends.
The data logged before Wednesday indicated nothing unusual with the engine, ErSelcuk said.
The flight crew asked to contact the passengers Thursday, rather than having Seaborne’s senior management contact them, ErSelcuk said, and praised the crew for their gesture and for their professional performance during the incident.
