The pictures and video from this morning’s Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 engine fire are arguably among the most dramatic ever captured for a widebody civilian passenger jet. As reported by CNN and others, the window seat video was captured by passenger Lee Bee Yee.

This supersedes the previous most dramatic 777 engine fire pictures and video taken just last September when British Airways Flight BA2276 aborted on take-off from Las Vegas. Further details and video can be found also at the Independent. The pictures of passengers calmly walking away from the damaged plane are still a bit surreal.

2014 saw first the disappearance of Boeing 777 Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 on 08Mar2014 (possible debris has recently been found in Tanzania) and then a scant four months later the downing of B777 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 on 17Jul2014 by a surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine. In the wake of these events, Malaysia Airlines retired their last B777 earlier this year.

It must be noted that the B777 fleet has amassed many millions of flight hours of incident-free operation over the past 21 years (first delivery was to United in June 1995). I flew on a United 777 from Newark to Beijing last month and would do so again without giving the matter a second thought. Nevertheless, the accident investigators will have their hands full figuring out what went wrong this morning and providing guidance to the industry so that it doesn’t happen again.