Philly Performer Saw British Airways Plane Burst Into Flames in Las Vegas

In this photo taken from the view of a plane window, smoke billows out from a plane that caught fire at McCarren International Airport, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2015, in Las Vegas. An engine on the British Airways plane caught fire before takeoff, forcing passengers to escape on emergency slides.

Reggie Bügmüncher is a sideshow artist (yes, those still exist) from the Whitman section of South Philadelphia whose act includes scary things like angle grinders, fire eating and breathing, and feats of pain endurance using barbed wire. But even she was scared on Tuesday when a British Airways plane caught fire on a Las Vegas runway, injuring more than a dozen people.

Philly performer “Reggie Bügmüncher” gets up close and personal with an angle grinder.

Bügmüncher (no, it’s not her real name, which she’s asked us not to use) performed at the San Diego Body Art Expo over the weekend and then took a Greyhound bus to see her boyfriend in Los Angeles, where she picked up a Philly-bound flight with a layover in Las Vegas.

“I landed in Vegas and immediately went to go smoke in the little smoking casino rooms at the airport,” she says. “Then I went to the Southwest boarding area, and all of a sudden, I heard a woman yell, ‘Oh my God!'”

Bügmüncher looked out the window and saw lots of fire and smoke coming from a British Airways flight on the runway.

“Everybody was looking around at each other and wondering if there are still people on the plane,” she recalls. “At some point, we assumed there wasn’t, because even though I’m sure it was just a minute or two, it felt like a really long time. It was a little bit scary. Then we saw people coming down the slides and everybody started groaning and gasping, because that was the moment we realized that there were actually people on that plane, so it got even scarier.”

She says that fire trucks showed up within a few minutes and that she was impressed with how quickly workers managed to empty the plane and get the fire out.

And her flight back to Philly? Only a small delay.

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