A Spanish charter jet with 138 people on board turned back to Madrid overnight shortly after take-off due to a "technical problem", an airport official said, amid reports of fire in one of the plane's engines.
"The plane asked to return to the airport because of a technical problem," around 1:30 a.m. Wednesday (2330 GMT Tuesday), said a spokesman for the Spanish airport and air navigation authority AENA, who gave no other details.
Passengers said they heard a series of explosions and saw flames in the plane's left-side engine, a Spanish news agency reported.
The aircraft's two engines are placed at the rear of the cabin.
A spokeswoman for the charter company Spanair, Yoanella Blanco, said that the pilot had detected a problem with the left-side engine, but denied that any explosions had occurred.
"It is possible that there was a flame in the engine," she said, but added that the pilot had not mentioned it in his report.
"Fire may have spurted from the left engine because its purge system had malfunctioned," the spokeswoman said.
One of the passengers said that the flight had been delayed for more than an hour at Madrid's Barajas airport while engineers corrected an unspecified problem, the agency said.
But Blanco said there had been no problems prior to take-off.
The plane, a twin-engine MD-83 chartered by the Spanish company Spanair, was carrying 132 passengers, mostly Spanish, and a crew of six on a flight to Edinburgh, Scotland.
A replacement jet was brought in to complete the flight - MADRID (AFP)
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