Twilight star live-tweets plane filling with smoke

A star of the Twilight films has live-tweeted the terrifying moments when smoke started filling the passenger plane he was flying on.

Jackson Rathbone was on the JetBlue flight from Long Beach, California, to Austin, Texas, with his wife and son when an engine problem saw the cabin start to fill with smoke just after take-off.

The 29-year-old, who played Jasper Hale in the series, wrote about the experience on his Twitter and WhoSay accounts.

"We were on @jetblue flight 1416 to Austin from Long Beach. Our right engine exploded and our cabin filled with smoke," he wrote.

"The oxygen masks did not deploy, but the brave stewardesses came around and manually deployed them. It was rough, the plane was rocking..."

Rathbone said he hugged his family and said the Lord's Prayer before the pilot announced the plane had lost its right engine.

"We were told to brace as we careened sharply back towards land," he wrote.

"Guided by our pilot, and I believe our guardian angels, we landed safely."

When it came time to evacuate the plane, Rathbone wrote that he grabbed his son and jumped down the inflated ramp.

"We left all our personal effects onboard," he said.

"Who cares. We were alive."

A few hours later Rathbone and his family boarded another JetBlue flight to their destination.

Video of the safety scare was posted online by a passenger on yesterday’s Texas-bound flight from Los Angeles’ Long Beach Airport.

In the video, the pilot can be heard explaining to the jet’s 142 passengers that there had been a “right engine failure”.

The pilot then asks his passengers to stay in their seats while staff try to clear the cabin of smoke.

A JetBlue spokeswoman told the Associated Press the crew declared an emergency after an "overheat warning" for one of its two engines.

One of the passengers, Dean Delbaugh, said he heard a popping sound about 10 minutes into the flight, followed by a weird vibration and an odd stench.

"Smoke came billowing out of the air vents and filled up the cabin in about 10 to 15 seconds," Mr Delbaugh said.

"The fumes were ridiculous. I can still kind of taste them in my mouth."

Flight attendants manually deployed oxygen masks, which only automatically drop down if the air pressure in the cabin gets too low.

Medical personnel treated four passengers on the scene, including a passenger who was hurt sliding down the slide and another with shortness of breath, the Los Angeles Times reports.