Yesterday taking off from HKG to TPE, we blew an engine on the runway. Besides the fact that we were held on the plane for over an hour while the mechanics tried to fix it (I could have told them before that it would not be possible) the Cathay FA's and staff did a great job of handling the passengers and a replacement aircraft was available in about an hour. Pretty good job CX!

When you say blown, do you mean that you could see from the outside that it had blown up or that there was some not-visible to the eye fault on the inside?

External failures are very rare.

I had an experience of something similar.. was on a CX HKG-ZRH flight about 10 years ago... I think it was a 747-200 or something.. don't remember really... we took off near midnight from Kai Tak, and about an hour into the flight, one of the engines on the left side literaly blew up... I was in F class and didn't see anything, but a friend of mine in C, where he had a good view of the engine, said he saw sparks and a flames..... not sure how there were flames when you're flying at 900mph at 35,000 feet, but whatever.. the pilot actually announced that we lost an engine and must fly back to Hong Kong. They actually opened back the airport for us, and we did an emergency landing with firetrucks and everything.... quite exciting for me at the time... Anyways, there wasn't a replacement aircraft available, and CX put us up in the airport hotel, and onto the same flight the next day...