His final flight was going to be to Barbados for a vacation with his daughter Charley, a favorite destination.

The findings came as the pilot of the plane, hailed a hero after a “textbook” response to the blaze, said he had “finished flying”.

“It would be like if your whole house was on fire and you had to go out the door”, she said.

Engine fires are unusual but not unheard-of.

The left engine and left side of the fuselage were badly damaged in the fire, although all 170 people aboard the plane survived.

Such actions not only defy British Airways own in-flight safety advice, but also fall foul of official guidelines. But they say it should be a faster investigation by virtue of the fact they actually have an engine to be able to look at.

The cockpit voice and flight data recorders have been sent away for analysis.

Don Knutson, an aircraft accident investigator in Wichita, Kansas, said mechanical failure, parts fatigue or the ingestion of debris all could have created the failure. The roll was quickly aborted by the pilots and the burning jet was evacuated. “That creates the energy to propel the jet forward”.

“One is that it failed because of age or it failed because it ingested something – it may have picked up something from the runway”. But he says it might not have sparked the fire itself.

“We’re interested in the exact chain of events”, said National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Eric Weiss.

Goglia discounted passenger accounts of an explosion, saying the release of pressure would create noise but not necessarily an explosion.

The NTSB added: “The powerplants and airworthiness groups will continue documenting the airplane and engine over the next several days”.

Clark County Fire Chief Greg Cassell said it appears the fire started in the jet’s number one engine.

“Everyone was screaming, ‘Just keep on running, ‘” said Karen Bravo, a 60-year-old who abandoned the flip-flops she had taken off minutes before to settle in for the 10-hour flight to Gatwick Airport south of London.

He told the Press Association: “The engine problem was in the high pressure compressor, which points us towards two things that might have gone wrong”. By the end of 2013, the aircraft had been flown for 76,618 hours, according to the British Civil Aviation Authority.

“A deadly slalom” is how pilot Patrick Smith described baggage on an emergency slide in a blog post.

If an engine breaks, the casing is created to stop any bits of metal flying out and damaging the rest of the aircraft, including the fuel tanks and the critical wiring that links up the controls.

“I felt too scared to get on the same British Airways flight they were putting on for us”, he said.

Cox said the planes crew and responding firefighters did exactly what was expected.