An Air France flight from Paris to Los Angeles was forced to make an emergency landing in Canada on Saturday after an engine apparently disintegrated over the Atlantic, reports The Telegraph.
Passengers said they heard a thud and vibrations rattled through the cabin as the A380 plane lost altitude.
"We heard a big popping sound and the airplane basically dropped and it was trembling. You could definitely tell something was different and it wasn't just turbulence," Sarah Eamigh told the New York Daily News, adding that the plane shook for 20 minutes before stabilising.
Another passenger, John Birkhead, said he had been stretching with his wife when "suddenly there was an enormous bang, and the whole plane shook."
"We were lucky we weren't tossed to the ground," he told the New York Times.
Passenger Pamela Adams said there was a "tremendous bang".
"It was like the plane hit a Jeep at 35,000 feet," she told the Associated Press. "We grabbed onto something and then we sat down, and the plane righted itself fairly soon."
Passengers nervously joked to one another as they tried to make sense of the commotion, Ms Adams said. She figured the plane had struck a bird, but then, it became clear that the situation was more dramatic.