The Qantas plane is about 19 years old, meaning this incident was likely a maintenance issue and not Boeing's fault. A contained failure means the engine did what it was designed to do during a failure by maintaining its parts within the engine's protective casing.

Investigators will spend the coming days and weeks examining data and inspecting the engine of a Qantas plane that failed during take-off at Sydney Airport.

A Qantas Airways plane bound for Brisbane suffered an engine failure after takeoff on Friday and circled for a short period of time before returning safely to Sydney Airport, the Australian airline said.