When over 150 people in Houston boarded a Southwest flight en route to Cancun, they were probably hoping to enjoy some heat… just not from a fire in their airplane’s right engine.


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In dramatic footage from both the ground and the air, the Boeing 737 started spitting flames shortly after takeoff.


“All I know is it started swinging like left to right,” passenger Coale Kalisek told KHOU. “I think I fly once or twice a month and I knew that wasn’t normal, and so I opened up my window and I’m sitting next to the engine and that whole engine you see like fireballs coming out of it.”



The plane was in the air for about 27 minutes, before returning to Houston for an emergency landing. But despite the scary visuals, experts stated that the situation was far from catastrophic.



“The passengers' lives were not in imminent danger,” one expert told NBC News. A different aviation expert, John Nance, claimed that the issue was most likely a “compressor stall,” also stating that it was not a dangerous situation. Commercial jetliners are more than capable of flying with one engine.



Southwest reportedly took the plane out of service for repairs and further evaluation and loaded passengers onto a different aircraft for the flight to Mexico. Kalisek however, decided to abandon his vacation and head home.