Passengers on a Great Barrier Airlines flight have told of their nightmare as a propeller came off, smashing a window and ripping off a door in mid-air.
"It was like an explosion going off inside the plane," one said yesterday.
"The propeller came off and hit the side of the plane, smashed a window and smashed a door.
"The other thing was that both propeller [blades] came off - the whole thing just destroyed itself. It just completely self-destructed.
"A door got ripped off and the side of the plane got smashed in - we all got covered in glass.
There was a huge amount of debris that we were just covered in. There were chunks of it the size of golf balls that came back and hit you."
The passenger said the 11.30am Sunday flight to Auckland from Claris Airfield was a six-minute nightmare, even with a safe emergency landing back at the airstrip.
The man, who did not want to be named, was one of 11, including the pilot, on board the three-engine plane. .
He said the impact of the right wing engine propeller was terrifying.
During take-off, passengers noticed the Trislander engine was wobbling.
"It was just lucky there was one seat spare - that was where it initially hit and pushed the side of the aircraft in. If someone had been sitting there, they would have been injured quite severely.
"Everyone remained fairly calm on the aircraft, but you know everyone was fairly nervous of what had happened - you know thinking 'Are we going to survive this? Is the aircraft going to break up from this?'," he said.
Two passengers needed medical treatment to remove debris from their eyes, and the man decided to catch a ferry back to Auckland rather than fly again.
He was angry the airline appeared to play down the situation yesterday, and also raised concerns about work he had seen engineers undertaking on the plane on Friday.
"It appears to me there was a problem there with it [then] or whether the problem had been created by the work carried out on who knows, but it just seems a coincidence that an engine they were working on two days later basically explodes."
Another passenger said events happened so quickly.
"It was really trying to assess the situation and hoping the plane would stay in the air and then we'd get back down safely."
Great Barrier Airlines chief executive Gerard Rea said the experience would have been "frightening" for those on board, and he had not intended to play down it. The airline would make available the results of an internal investigation as soon as it was available.
Friday's maintenance on the plane was nothing to do with the propeller, he said.
The incident is being investigated by the Transport Accident Investigation Commission.
