“My whole body just went to jelly,” the passenger, Tyler Wooster, told Australia’s Nine Network, “and I didn’t know what was going to happen as we were going down, if we were going to be O.K.”

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Passengers said the flight crew made frequent and reassuring announcements. Some took cellphone video of smoke pouring from under the left wing.

The flight was set upon by emergency crews after it returned to Changi International Airport in Singapore about 11:45 a.m. Local news media broadcast images of the charred No. 2 engine  the inside engine on the left wing  being doused by fire engines. Television images from the island of Batam in Indonesia showed people holding large chunks of metal, some bearing the red and white paint of the Qantas insignia.

Photographs taken by several passengers from inside the plane and posted on the Internet showed at least two large punctures on the upper side of the wing, with bits of metal skin protruding.

“It looks like there are a couple of pretty good sized holes with the metal blown out,” said William R. Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, based in Alexandria, Va. “That almost certainly means that debris came up through the bottom of the wing.”

Alan Joyce, Qantas’s chief executive, said the airline would suspend the A380s “until we are confident that Qantas safety requirements have been met,” according to a statement on the airline’s Web site. But he said that the episode would not affect Qantas’s current order for 14 more A380s.