United Airlines Flight 2127 pushed back in Los Angeles around 10:15 a.m. Pacific time this morning bound for Newark. The Boeing 787-9, registered as N24972, took off at 10:43 a.m. It was back on the ground 36 minutes later with a left engine issue. Update: evacuation footage from inside the aircraft below.
🚨Exclusive video: A United 787 lands at LAX and emergency slides are deployed—engine catches fire after landing! Seen live on Airline Videos Live, March 2nd, 2026. pic.twitter.com/GlgnDUHTVx
— AIRLINE VIDEOS (@airlinevideos) March 2, 2026
There was visible smoke near the left engine when the plane landed, with fire crews spraying it down. It was still smoking nearly an hour later.
256 passengers and 12 crew evacuated the aircraft via slides onto a taxiway, and were bused to the terminal. The only known injury was a passenger’s cut finger. The issued a ground stop at the airport, which was lifted around 12:30 p.m. local time. However, runway 25L remained closed.
United flight LAX to EWR diverted back to LAX for engine fire, evacuated all passengers. Crazy video @ABC7 @KTLA @FOXLA @NBCLA pic.twitter.com/B2oqaAqZoB
— Kieran Gilmore (@kierangilmore_) March 2, 2026
JUST IN | Aircraft Emergency, Ground Stop at LAX
United flight #2127 was heading to Newark and reported engine problems shortly after taking off from LAX. They returned to make an emergency landing at LAX. The aircraft landed safely and all crew members and passengers have… pic.twitter.com/ccVYr4yn3u— Citizen Los Angeles (@CitizenAppLA) March 2, 2026
The United Club was hastily closed. Presumably they planned to use the space managing this, perhaps for evacuated passengers.
Update: Here’s video from inside the aircraft, heading down the slide taken by a passenger during the evacuation.
I was sitting next to the engine 😅 pic.twitter.com/xddgo84gCG
— Hash Tribe 🏕 (@thehashtribe) March 2, 2026
Taking video of the evacuation is not a great idea! It can be a distraction from making it out as quickly and safely as possible. Nonetheless you’ll probably be seeing quite a bit of this footage, and it’s commonplace in incidents like this one.
Yikes. Hope everyone’s alright. Looks expensive. (Tim, go easy on ’em…)
Odd that they were stopped for over a minute, waiting for the air stairs to hook up to 1R. The slides didn’t deploy until 1R was opened for the stairs.
If it was an emergency enough to deploy the slides why would they wait? And the converse, if it was fine to wait even a minute, why deploy the slides?
Make that over 2 and a half minutes after being stopped before the slides deployed.