Disaster averted in Vegas as passengers evacuate London-bound jetliner amid flames and billowing smoke

British Airways flight 2276 en route to London’s Gatwick Airport on fire at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 08 September 2015. (BRADLEY HAMPTON/ TWITTER via EPA)
 
It looked like a disaster. Smoke billowed from the British Air Boeing 777-200 as it taxied into position for takeoff. Flames shot out from its left engine. People watching the scene from inside Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport were horrified.

“Oh, my God,” Reggie Bügmüncher said as he looked at out the window at the fire, according to the AP. Bügmüncher, who was waiting at a gate for different flight, said “everyone ran to the windows and people were standing on their chairs, looking out, holding their breath with their hands over their mouths.”
No cause has been determined so far for the fire in the plane’s engine. But it could have been a disaster indeed had not the London-bound plane’s crew and passengers made a hasty and efficient exit down the inflatable evacuation chutes and had firefighters been any less quick in dousing the flames, which erupted from one of the aircraft’s engines.
As it turned out, the fire and smoke did not penetrate the cabin. Chris Jones a spokesperson for the airport told the Associated Press that all 159 passengers and 13 crew members aboard flight 2276 headed for London’s Gatwick Airport made it off the plane. Fire officials told the news agency that 14 people suffered minor injuries from sliding down the chutes after the fire broke out shortly after 4 p.m. Pacific time.
It was a good thing too. According to NBC, witnesses said the heat was so intense it melted windows on the plane.
Here’s one version of how it went down, as tweeted by passenger Jacob Steinberg, who identified himself as a writer for The Guardian.
Steinberg said he was asleep as the plane was taking off. Suddenly it “came to a crashing halt.” There was a “smell of smoke,” and passengers were told to stay seated before the pilot ordered the evacuation.
“They opened the back door and [the slide] went down and smoke started coming” in the plane, “followed by a mad dash to the front. A lot of panic,” he tweeted.source:Washington post