Skystream
Filing Flight Plan
I was at one of the park district pools in Arlington Heights, IL this early evening which is fairly close to KORD (about a 20-30 minute drive by car). At roughly about 5:47pm or 5:48pm everybody heard 5-7 loud BANGS in rapid succession and everybody at the pool looked up. I looked up and saw flames shooting out of the left inboard engine on a 747-400 which was probably above 6000' by that point. It was close enough that I could recognize the British Airways colorings. They continued tracking north and turned a bit to the northeast. I told everybody there that I figured he's probably go over Lake Michigan and fly holding patterns for awhile to burn off fuel (rather than dump it) and come back. I checked on Flight Aware a few times on my phone before my phone died. Last I checked, BA294 was over Michigan (the state, not the lake) and I assumed that maybe they were able to continue on to Heathrow. A few hours later while at home, I checked Flight Aware and found that I was indeed correct.... looks like they flew a couple of holding patterns for 2 hours before coming back in to KORD. Here's a picture of the track, courtesy of Flight Aware. The engine problem occurred on their north track just before you see the turn to the northeast. That's about where it was when we heard the bangs! I do have video of the plane, but the flames and sounds had already ended by that point.
