LATAM Flight LA2302 Stopped Before Takeoff in Lima After Fire Broke Out on Its A320’s Left Side

The Airbus A320 operating LATAM Airlines Perú flight LA2302 from Lima to Piura stopped before takeoff on Monday morning, October 19, 2026, after fire broke out on its left side. The jet, registered CC-BFS, never left the ground.

Passengers were taken off at Jorge Chávez International Airport and flown to Piura hours later on another aircraft.

LATAM called it an “unforeseen technical event” before takeoff and has not said which part of the aircraft failed. Videos and photos shared on social media, some taken from inside the cabin, show smoke and flames on the left side of the jet.

What happened on the runway

The Aviation Herald reported that the A320 was lining up on runway 16R when its left engine produced a continuous fire. The aircraft stopped and the runway was closed, it said.

Firefighters responded, and Infobae reported that no one was injured. El Comercio reported that the captain told passengers the takeoff had been suspended because of a technical failure on the aircraft’s left side.

How the passengers left the aircraft, whether by stairs or by slides, has not been reported, and neither has the number of people on board. Two members of the Peruvian cumbia group Corazón Serrano were among them, and both posted images of the flames, Infobae reported.

Flight tracking data from Flightradar24 and FlightAware show LA2302 eventually departed at about 9:58 a.m. local time on a different A320, CC-BFR, and landed in Piura at 11:17 a.m., roughly four hours behind its 5:30 a.m. schedule. The Aviation Herald said CC-BFS was still on the ground in Lima about 10 hours after the event.

What LATAM and the airport have said

In its statement, carried by Peru’s state news agency Andina, LATAM said the passengers were disembarked as a preventive measure and that its teams were helping them and rebooking them on other flights. The airline said the circumstances will be the subject of a technical evaluation.

The statement does not use the word fire. It ends with the airline regretting the inconvenience and restating its commitment to air safety.

The airport said on X that an emergency involving a LATAM flight had occurred that morning, that the incident was controlled and that the airline was looking after the passengers, La República reported. The airport also said its flights were operating normally, according to Diario Correo.

Peru’s consumer protection agency, Indecopi, sent staff to the airport to monitor how LATAM was looking after the affected passengers, both outlets reported.

Engine or wing? The sources do not agree

Andina and La República described the fire as being on the left wing. Infobae and The Aviation Herald placed it at the left engine, which on the Airbus A320 hangs beneath the left wing.

From a passenger window or a phone video, flames coming from an engine’s exhaust can easily look like a burning wing, so the two descriptions may be of the same thing. Only the airline or investigators can settle it, and neither has yet.

The tailpipe fire theory, and why it does not quite fit

La República quoted unnamed sources who said the problem appeared to be a tailpipe fire. That is a fire inside the engine’s own gas path, fed by unburned fuel pooling in the combustion chamber, turbine or exhaust nozzle.

Tailpipe fires can throw dramatic flames out of the back of an engine but rarely damage it, since that part of the engine is built for extreme heat, according to the aviation safety reference SKYbrary. The usual cure is to cut the fuel and spin the engine with its starter to blow the flames out, not to fire the engine’s extinguishers, which discharge outside the core.

SKYbrary also says a tailpipe fire happens only on the ground and only during engine start or shutdown. LA2302 was already lining up on the runway, by The Aviation Herald’s account, well after engine start, so the theory would need a twist that no on-record source has described.

Three days after LA2424’s return to Lima

The fire came three days after another LATAM Airlines Perú flight out of Lima, LA2424 to São Paulo, turned back with oxygen masks deployed on its Boeing 767. The two events involve different aircraft types and there is no sign they are related.

LATAM has said only that LA2302’s aircraft will be examined. No finding from that evaluation had been published at the time of writing.