Qantas passengers who thought they were going to die when a mid-air scare left a gaping hole in their plane's fuselage finally completed a disrupted journey to Australia on Saturday.
They arrived in Melbourne on a replacement aircraft to an emotional welcome from family and friends and as reports emerged that the plane involved in the drama had a history of corrosion problems.
The passengers were flying over the South China Sea bound for Melbourne on Friday when a mid-air rupture punched a three metre (10 foot) hole in the belly of their Boeing 747, forcing the pilot make an emergency landing in Manila.
Many were still shaken by the ordeal which saw the aircraft plunge 6,000 metres (20,000 feet) before stabilising.
Steve Winchester said he thought he was going to die.
"Everyone was just thinking to themselves 'oh I think this is it'," he told reporters.
"I heard someone scream. People were just looking at each other in sheer terror."
Winchester said the fuselage breach caused a hole to open up in the cabin floor and sent debris flying through the plane's interior.
"It was everywhere, it was just like it was snowing in the cabin," he said.
Melbourne man David Saunders said he hugged his girlfriend and put his passport in his pocket so his body could be more easily identified as the plane dived towards the sea.
"I heard an enormous explosion, things went quiet, the cabin instantly lost pressure and the plane just started to dive. I thought we were going down into the sea," he said.
Meanwhile, investigators in Manila, including four officers from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, were poring over the stricken aircraft to try to find the cause of the problem.
Sydney's Daily Telegraph reported that engineers discovered a large amount of corrosion in the jumbo during a major refurbishment earlier this year.
Under the front page headline "Rust Bucket", the newspaper said the 17-year-old jet received a new interior at Melbourne's Avalon airport in March and said aviation sources had told it engineers had found a lot of corrosion.
A senior Qantas pilot told the Telegraph that Friday's drama may be related to the airline's decision to outsource aircraft maintenance to Malaysia.
"This could well be the direct result of Qantas having stand-in engineers, or from outsourcing maintenance to Malaysia," the unnamed pilot told the newspaper.
"It has been talked about a lot here and we have been told to be extra vigilant when you walk around the aircraft.
"With Qantas outsourcing maintenance to Malaysia, (it) is certainly worrying a lot of us pilots.".
The Boeing 747-400 took off from London with 346 passengers and 19 crew on board and was heading to Melbourne after a stopover in Hong Kong when the incident occurred.
Qantas Airways boasts of its safety record, having never lost a jet to an accident. In the 1988 film "Rain Man," an autistic character played by Dustin Hoffman insists on flying with the airline precisely for that reason.
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