I saw a video someone took out the window of the flaming engine. It was unsettlingly quiet; no one talking or screaming, just the background plane noise.
I cannot imagine seeing an engine on fire outside your window and being that calm. Just incredible.
That's most likely because the plane itself was flying stable and the pilot informed the passengers well. It not having a direct impact on the perceived flight characteristics in the passenger compartment removes it from you in a way.
I've been on turbulent fligts before where people where screeming but the plane was perfectly fine.
I went on a ride in a jet trainer. The most relevant safety instructions I got were "the only time we bail is if there's an engine fire I can't put out. If I can put it out, we'll glide to an airstrip--this plane is an excellent glider." I have no idea how people who haven't been briefed on engine fires would deal with one.
I guess it doesn't, but it is useful for English pronouns later on. I'm curios what's idiomatic in languages without gendered pronouns. It'd be different if it called out her race.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Meh, a plane can fly with one engine, and glide with none. I wouldn’t be too worried, unless it blew up and took out a wing. And even if they were flying over the pacific, planes are required to be within a certain distance of land at all times. Probably enough to get to an airport.
And many passengers on the flight casually dismissed it as well from what the article says.
Also, sometimes engines fail silently and passengers don’t even realize it since air keeps blowing through it to keep it spinning. You likely have been on a plane with a downed engine and didn’t even realize it if you fly regularly. You were fine.
The passengers would be unaware only if the engine failure occurred near the destination. Pilots don't just keep flying for hours with an engine failure if they have any alternative places to land.
Funnily enough I was searching about for info on B772 single engine range and found this anecdote that contradicts you.
>Just as a practical example of reduced range with an engine out, We departed Santiago, Chile in a 747 freighter with enough fuel to reach Miami. During the climb out we lost an engine. We elected to continue rather than dump fuel and return. However, because we could not reach our intended cruising altitude, the increased fuel burn meant we only had enough fuel to reach Panama City, Panama
Almost definitely not, but it still shows that pilots aren't too concerned about engine outs to the point where it's an automatic mayday, especially on a four engined planes. I wouldn't have shared the anecdote if it hadn't violated my preconceptions.
As with anything, there always are exceptions. In this case Smartwings flight QS-1125: the pilot in command ignored an engine failure and went on to land on the original destination instead of landing at the closest suitable airport.
> Also, sometimes engines fail silently and passengers don’t even realize it since air keeps blowing through it to keep it spinning. You likely have been on a plane with a downed engine and didn’t even realize it if you fly regularly. You were fine.
The FAA estimates that jet engines fail once per 375,000 flight hours. So no, you're not "likely" to have been on a plane with a downed engine.
If you wanna act so damn tough criticizing what may well be partially an emotional reaction of the part of these passengers, you should at least get your facts right.
> Many of these people reasonably thought they would die.
Believing that the loss of single engine in this kind of plane will lead to a crash is not reasonable. It's a failure which happens all the time. If this sort of failure usually led to a crash then planes would be falling out of the sky all the time, which even someone with very little knowledge about planes (such as myself) should very well know doesn't happen.
Saying otherwise is literal FUD. Our society seems to run on FUD now though so par for the course I guess.
I was not on the plane so I don't know but if I was sitting on a plane and there was odd turbulence and then people at the window in front started exclaiming that the plane was on fire then I would be worried.
In addition disintegrating jet engines sometimes cause problems by shooting fragments of turbine into the body of the plane. There are very valid reasons to be worried even if you know you have one working engine.
You have contradicted yourself by saying, "someone with very little knowledge about planes (such as myself)" and also saying, "It's a failure that happens all the time." Knowing that the engine failures happen all the time is not something that someone with very little knowledge would know.
Most engine failures are not this spectacular. If an engine is quietly shut down due to some fault, low oil pressure or high temperature or something, you'd likely never notice until the captain announced that you'd be landing at an alternate airport due to a techincal problem.
I'm not sure I'd say they happen "all the time" but engine shutdowns are not uncommon. Read avherald.com for a few weeks to see just how many technical problems come up routinely in commercial aviation.
If you are on the plane, you don’t care a bit about statistics. “Most” is not your concern. You want no further risk. And by definition, losing half of your engines presents a lot of risk.
There is an unfortunate famous incident in Amsterdam decades ago where a 747 cargo plane lost an engine, and the ejected material caused additional damage. Then the engine sheared off, striking another engine. Then it became a disaster scenario.
Myself an no other passengers on any plane are comfortable with losing an engine. Only people sitting at home, crunching numbers, are unconcerned.
> disintegrating jet engines sometimes cause problems by shooting fragments of turbine into the body of the plane.
The most famous uncontained engine failure incident was the 1989 Sioux City crash of United 232, where exploding fan blade bits took out all hydraulic lines and the plane became nearly uncontrollable. The pilots almost got it on the ground using only engine thrust to control the plane, but it crashed as it came in and 112 people died.
Similar hydraulic problems arising from uncontained engine failure caused Baikal Airlines Flight 130 to go down in 1994 (125 fatalities), and a 1984 Aeroflot crash (110 fatalities).
Shrapnel from exploding engines also killed two passengers on Delta 1288 in 1996, and led to a fatality in in a 1973 incident on National Airlines 27.
Uncontained engine failure is not common and it's very serious.
That page lists this 777 flight as having had an uncontained engine failure, but from photos, video and reporting so far, it's not clear it's uncontained.
Contained failures mean the disintegrating parts don't exit the engine casing, they either remain inside the engine casing or exit out the back. The reporting so far is that all parts exited out the back, not through the engine casing in a way that could have caused catastrophic damage to other parts of the plane.
But I think we can agree that the passengers on the plane would not have known that information and would understandably and reasonably have been very worried and/or terrified.
This requirement that planes be within a certain distance of land at all times is a myth. While some flight plans are adjusted slightly for safety, there are absolutely long haul routes that just blaze right across a wide-open ocean.
The distance must be fairly generous. I flew directly over the top of the north pole in a 777, and I have to imagine that at that point the nearest 777-capable landing strip is quite a ways off.
I found the Wikipedia article for that airport, which says it has one runway of 2,623 meters and serves as a diversion airport on polar routes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iqaluit_Airport
It depends on how you define fairly close. Iqaluit Airport is just over 1,800 miles from the North Pole, or about four hours of flying time (at cruising speed, more if you have to fly lower with a dead engine).
They hardly do anymore. The remaining 3 and 4 engine airliners like the 747 and A380 are on the way out. Twin engines like the 777, 787, and the A350 are going to be the only planes flying these long haul routes going forward because they are just so much more efficient. With increased reliability over the years, ETOPS regulations have loosened up far enough that you can fly to/from any point on earth without being beyond the max range from land.
ETOPS ("Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim") flight plans are routed so that an airport can be reached with a single operational engine in so-and-so many minutes. If both engines are out, it's going to be a water landing: https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/etops-pla...
ETOPS is "Extended Twin OPerationS". It doesn't have anything to do with water. It has to do with range from an alternate airport when flying twin engine aircraft. The terminology has been updated to EDTO (Extended Diversion Time Operations) to apply the guidance to four engine planes like the 747-8.
The longest route in the world is Singapore to Newark, 18.5 hours, so six isn't gonna get you there, but it'll get you to a safe landing.
Finally, we have two engines (in part) so you can safely lose one. Losing one engine when you've only got one is a substantially more significant emergency.
It can’t take off from a standstill with a full load of fuel and passengers with only one engine. Level (or slowly descending) flight doesn’t needs as much power.
If you normally cruise with two engines at 50% going to one engine at 100% isn’t such a stretch.
I’m not rated for a specific interval with only one leg, though. I’d really like to know how an aircraft gets certified for six hours and not, say, six and a half.
Proof of the required reliability, basically. Both showing that you've done it at a lower certification level, and actually doing demonstration flights where you run around with only one engine. Certification authorities check and make sure the required reliability is available (because having your second engine fail 5 1/2 hours from the nearest diversion airport sucks).
An old coworker was a private pilot. He told me that the purpose of the second engine in a twin-engine private plane was to get you to the scene of the crash.
Good question... You wouldn't land safely. That's part of the reason the design of the engine is such that if there's a failure, the engine cowling is supposed contain all the debris so that there is no damage to the wing, airframe or associated systems.
Yes. But then it's used up its safety margin. So your logic works for why you shouldn't worry when the plane is in perfectly good working order and has two working engines. Your logic is completely idiotic for when one engine has failed.
> , and glide with none
Not very far, it can't! About 150 km from cruising altitude. This plane was still climbing out of its departure airport. Do you remember just how far US Airways 1549 got to comfortably glide after losing power during its ascent? Give me a break.
> And even if they were flying over the pacific, planes are required to be within a certain distance of land at all times. Probably enough to get to an airport.
The Boeing 777 can be ETOPS-330! 330 minutes at one-engine speed from a diversion airport. That's pretty far! Sure, on one engine they'd be fine, but you're a moron for ridiculing them for having shaved away their safety margin.
> Edit: I don’t get the downvotes. It’s true.
"It's true"? "It" is a bunch of lazy opinionated crap that's meant to ridicule someone for being worried when a very safe mode of transportation just shaved away a gigantic part of its safety margin.
I definitely can't be calm and shooting video like this. For me, a plane flight is a totally magical blackbox, in which I just get onboard, sit, lay back, and done. Maybe I should be more informed.
I'm the opposite. I was always a nervous flyer until I joined Boeing designing flight critical systems. Knowing how the airplanes are engineered gave me a lot of confidence in flying.
I hope what they want is to reduce the likelihood of human error causing catastrophic failure. Not necessarily to take humans out of the loop altogether.
you can't just say that and not tell me how he put his nose up (the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do in a stall warning) and even overrode the automatic stick-pusher, leaving the poor plane to gyrate like thishttps://youtu.be/lxywEE1kK6I?t=120
(and confusing the poor airport ATC who didn't understand where the plane went)
Really interesting comment on that video which might give some explanation:
The pilots of Colgan Air had to attend a "tail-stall" course about a month prior to the accident. As a professional pilot I know that if I found myself in a stall less than a month after training about it, the first thing that comes to mind is a "tail stall" and the recovery procedure is counter-intuitive (pitch up, not down). A tail stall has very subtle differences from that of a regular and are hard to distinguish which are which.
I've commented extensively on the 737MAX many times, based on my experience as a flight controls engineer.
In summary, the MCAS' dependence on one sensor was anomalous for Boeing and aviation engineering practice, and serves to emphasize the importance of the dual-path practice.
I don't know much about the internal workings of planes but every time I fly I feel so relaxed,almost like if I've gone to a meditation or something. I had a handful of near misses in my life( not with planes) , where you just get to realisation that if things will go wrong, you won't just break a neck,or sprain a muscle, but will 100% be dead. That knowledge somehow allows to remove the panic and simply focus on the task at hand. How I'd react on such a flight is hard to say,as nothing would depend on me.
Funny how that happens. I was in 2 near miss situations, both times I was extremely calm. Calmer than I have ever been. Afterwords I was shaking pretty hard though.
There is no reason to believe Boeing or the FAA are at fault here. The plane performed as designed and was able to safely return to the airport with no injuries. Boeing's design and construction did what it was supposed to do, FAA procedures were followed, everyone walked away safely.
There have been three significant airliner engine failures in 72 hours. All aircraft survived. All are Boeing; 777 (Denver), 747 (Maastricht) and 737 (Makassar.)
That's a lot of engine failures. It's hard to find a common mode here, other than they're Boeing, which is next to meaningless; the engines and airframes are all very different.
Still, it's hard to overcome instinct. "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
(It's a quote from Ian Fleming; I'm not suggesting any sort of 'attack,' only that some common mode phenomenon could be in play)
We get 4 or 5 and we're going to have to look at this really hard. If I had a gun to my head when asked what is going on I would speculate that perhaps these engines need more scrutiny before returning to service after a long COVID-19 hiatus. But then I don't actually know if that was even the case for any or all of the engines involved.
Hit the nail on the head here. The bigger problem isn't that there was an engine failure or even a blade off failure. The problem is that the containment failed. An engine is designed to lose a blade, have the cowling and engine frame contain the damage and land safely. When that containment fails, the damage and potential for catastrophe increases exponentially.[Edit - Spelling]
The engine lost its shrapnel barrier. It it had managed to ingest debris, the fans could have blown their way through the fuselage, killing anyone in the line of fire. Something is to blame for an event that is never supposed to happen.
Bird strikes generally do not cause engines to explode. The 777 engines in particular were specifically designed to be survive ingestion of frozen turkeys.
Yeah but I bet they don't test the engine by throwing the turkeys in while its actually flying. Could easily be bird strike broke a fan blade that damaged the outer cowlings enough that they broke off/apart due to airspeed. From what I understand these engines use a unique hollow fan blade; so it could also just be an early/unexpected failure.
I wonder why you would freeze the turkey before throwing it in. Surely their aren't frozen birds that size flying around. It's like shooting a man.. before throwing him out an airplane.
They froze the turkeys to make them easier to fire out of their pneumatic cannon at several hundred miles per hour. (I saw this on a documentary about the 777 on TV, and I can't find the clips on YouTube).
There is no indication this is a Boeing issue. First off the Boeing 777 has been in widespread service for about 25 years. Secondly Boeing doesn’t make engines, companies like GE and Rolls Royce and P&W do. And lastly, this is most likely the result of a United mechanic making an error of some kind while performing maintenance on the aircraft. Let’s wait for investigations to complete before jumping to conclusions.
You don't know that. The mechanic could have been following a P&W procedure that did not account for some wear in the engine. Is that mechanic even a United employee or P&W or a contractor? The mechanic could have installed the wrong part. It could have been a totally random part failure. I can go on. There's too many possibilities to speculate at this point. Reports say the engine was vibrating before the cowling came off. That could be caused by many factors. It could have been a bird strike. The plane in front could have lost an engine or tire and this one sucked up FOD. We just do not know yet. The plane landed, the engine will be inspected.
I don’t know that, but with the present lack of information I was venturing a low information guess simply because the aircraft is otherwise very reliable in all its variants. In any case it looks like groundings are currently being ordered only for 777s with the P&W engines because they uniquely have hollow fan blades.
I found this video shocking at first and then incredibly reassuring. Stable flight with an engine on fire really hit home how well designed these planes are
My mom was a flight attendant. She and my dad used to take my brother and I on a lot of trips. Once, when I was young, we got on a flight to Germany out of JFK (TWA). Almost immediately after takeoff (presumably from a bird strike), an engine caught on fire. A few things I'll never forget: 1) since it was a night flight and the cabin lights were off, the inside of the plane was lit up so intensely by the flames it would have made the creators of a disaster movie envious, 2) many adults around me were screaming, 3) my mom leaned over and said to me in a voice no less calm than if she were telling me what she packed for my school lunch, "Don't worry, the captain will shut off fuel to that engine and turn around and land. But we'll have to go someplace else for our trip." I instantly went from being terrified to totally relaxed, and the next day we went to Disney World.
Panic as a herd response probably affords some group survival benefit, though it's of relatively little individual utility. The idea being that everyone starts acting unpredictably.
When you're being chased by large predators (or a sudden rockfall, tidal wave, fire, etc.), that may be useful.
When you're in a highly technical environment in which the entire group's survival is a unitary phenomenon (everybody's, or overall, survival either does or does not happen), everyone going their own way is precisely the wrong thing to do. That's a relatively new development evolutionarily.
> "Don't worry, the captain will shut off fuel to that engine and turn around and land. But we'll have to go someplace else for our trip"
Compare to "Don't worry, everything will be fine", I found this calms me down better. Because it keeps me occupied on verifying the claim rather than allowing me wonder about what "fine" was actually meat.
But again, we don't actually know why "many adults were screaming" there, maybe they've already figured it out, and they are screaming because they don't want to go someplace else :-D
It would also calm me down because it is quite specific and shows a possible resolution and course of action, instead of a vague 'fine'. What is fine, when will it be fine, how will it be fine?
In general I think it would also help to educate people more about how much abuse a plane likely can stand. For me a plane is too much of a fragile aluminium tube with a ton of explosive fuel and some superheated engines, at a scary high altitude.
I'm going to educate you more right now - jet fuel is not explosive in the sense that you think it is. It's much less volatile than gasoline and is regularly dumped overboard in emergency situations with no fire risk. Modern jets can fly just fine with one engine shut off like in the OP. Provided that there is enough altitude, planes will glide their way to back a runway to land if both engines go out. The structure can take way more abuse than you think - see this picture of a 787 undergoing a wing structural test. http://blog.flightstory.net/wp-content/uploads/787-ultimate-...
I used to fly into a UK gov office for work every week for a couple of years, must have taken over 100 flights so during that time so I got pretty relaxed about flying. Also my mum loves Australia so I’ve been taking long-haul flights to Brisbane from Belfast and back pretty much every year since I was six-years-old.
One time I was taking my usual flight over the Irish Sea and the pilot comes on and says “unfortunately we’ve encountered a mechanical issue and will be redirecting to Manchester”.
That’s the first time I’ve seen people crying on a plane, most people were calm though. I was a bit nervous but I realised there was nothing I could do about it except keep calm and not distract cabin crew.
Never found out what happened, we all just shuffled onto a different plane once we landed at Manchester and then took the shortest flight I’ve ever taken in my life, can’t have been more than 20 minutes from Manc to East Mids
"Hello everyone, this is the captain speaking. This is normally the point where I tell you about the weather in [destination], and that we've reached our cruising altitude. Unfortunately, we haven't reached our cruising altitude, so I won't tell you about the weather.
We have a serious problem with this aircraft, and we're going to return to [origin]. We must first reduce our weight, so those of you at the rear will soon see a white spray from the wings as we dump some fuel. That should take about 20 minutes, and we'll then begin our descent.
Please listen to the instructions from the cabin crew, who will prepare you for the landing."
"Landing", in this case, meant the heaviest landing I've ever experienced, followed by the strongest braking, and fire engines surrounding the plane and spraying the undercarriage. Fortunately, this was a precaution, and we didn't have to evacuate the plane.
The crew stayed with the passengers until everything was sorted out (luggage, hotels etc), and I found myself in conversation with an elderly couple from row 1, the first officer and the purser. The woman passenger said she had seen how calm the purser was, and was reassured that all was fine. The purser replied "ma'am, I'm trained to stay calm. This is the worst incident of my career, and I'm due to retire next year."
The first officer explained that the primary hydraulics had failed. The hydraulic fluid is flammable, and could be leaking somewhere hot (or due to be hot, i.e. the wheels). They pressed a button which opened a valve and flushed the hydraulic pipes with inert gas, but it wasn't possible to know if that removed any/enough remaining fluid -- hence the fire engines spraying the plane when it landed.
O-rings aren't just for engineers. It's a standard part use in many everyday scenarios, not just rockets. You can buy them in the hardware store. The cladding is most certainly not an o-ring, even to the layman.
Rather, the writer probably used the word o-ring specifically because of association with the Challenger disaster. They probably remember (maybe subconsciously) a lot of discussion of o-rings in a disaster back in the day so that word popped into mind when describing a part related to this disaster.
It wasn't the lady on the flight calling it an o-ring, it was the writer. And there's no way you'd just happen to make up the word "o-ring" unless you were trying to reference an existing term. You'd just call it a "ring" as the lady on the flight did.
On which page of the illustrated parts catalog does one find the metal cladding of the engine? The part resting in the shrubbery was the lipskin and forward bulkhead of the engine inlet, which form an assembly called the D-Duct, which contains hot bleed air which is used to to anti-ice the leading edge of the engine inlet.
You can tell that the pictures of the debris were taken by drones. The area around them has been taped off with police tape, I'm sure photographers aren't allowed close enough to get good pictures.
The engine seems to be on fire without the fire ever going out, why is that? Is there still residual fuel in the pipes after the fuel is shut off or is it oil, etc?
I don't understand why everyone is so calm either, if the engine is on fire there is no guarantee that it won't blow up or worse take out a big piece of the wing, etc. and causing a crash.
There are passengers who cause total mayhem even when the plane is not moving [0]
A few years ago, I was on a transatlantic flight about to depart from the east coast (accelerating down the runway) when there was a loud bang and the plane skidded to a stop.
One of the engines somehow managed to shred itself to pieces and fall off the wing onto the tarmac. The bang was apparently shrapnel and scrap metal hitting the fuselage rather than an actual explosion.
As we hadn't actually taken off yet there wasn't all that much drama, but boy it was a long wait until we finally got off the plane and could use the overnight lodging vouchers the airline provided.
The only thing that makes this news article relevant was that they were both planes. Of course having your only engine fail would make your plane crash. Having one of your two engines fail is, as we see, relatively unproblematic to your life expectancy
I cannot imagine seeing an engine on fire outside your window and being that calm. Just incredible.
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