> I don't think engine failure on an airplane is such an anti-climatic event, on average.
It often is, actually. They have more than one engine precisely for that scenario, and can fly quite well with one down. Flights over water are also carefully planned based on distance to the nearest airport with an engine out.
> for the plane to crash not one but both engines would have to fail
I recently rode in a 2-person jet. The pilot said the only reason we might bail out is an engine fire. If the engine fails, the plane's an excellent glider, and we'll glide to an airport/airstrip. Now, this was somewhere with airports all over, not an ocean.
Modern engines are ridiculously reliable and ridiculously powerful. That means they don’t fail frequently. And when they do, one is enough to limp to safety [1].
Per the usual trope-y statistic: if you want a safe trip for your vacation, don't drive to the airport (which would be the riskiest leg of the journey).
> I think shutting down the engines is probably the safest option when this sort of thing happens. You could argue they should stay in the present setting, but...
Shutting down an engine should always be a decision made by the pilot not a machine IMO. A pilot might prefer to blow out an engine if that gives him enough ( even a couple of seconds matter in this situation ) time to reach a save landing spot or avoid an obstacle.
> what would happen if one engine were at 0% and another 100%?
Pilots are train in this situation all the time and is part of the syllabus for a multi-engine rating. Basically the plane would try to turn to the side that the engine failed. Pilot will use opposite ruder and aileron to compensate while cutting back power in the good engine to just enough you can keep altitude if possible.
> Most aircraft are pretty good at gliding even without power, and I'd assume a deadstick landing is part of the pilots training.
So happen here too. The crew tried tried a dead-stick landing in a field when they realized the could not make the airport. Unfortunately the hit a High Power pole and the plane catch fire.
One of the crew members lost in the accident was a friend of my father. My condolence to the families of those who lost their live that day.
> More recent planes are usually ever better (the OG 747 is from 1969!) At the very least it allows the pilot to 'land' on sea and wait for evacuation in zodiacs. So even in the extremely unprobable event that ETOPS failed (the statistical outlier where a plane loses both engines), you'd probably just glide to the ground 100-200km away at most to reach some landing spot.
While I agree with the rest, landing on sea is a terrible idea. That can work on rivers where you have no waves. But gliding onto an ocean with waves will likely be fatal. Luckily, there is no recent case of a double engine failure where landing on sea was necessary (apart from maybe MH370 but we don't know that).
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.
> What happens to the vehicle when a major failure happens at high speed? What about sudden pressure loss at high altitude? Or mechanical failure…
The same thing that happens in any other plane.
> … or weather which causes a diversion (how much ground do you cover just turning around?).
This is an extremely weird concern. There’s so much wrong with it I’m not even sure where to start: planes can slow down, sharp turns due to weather mid-route are not even really a thing, I’m not even sure why covering extra ground is such a bad thing anyway.
> Maintenance is absolutely a possible issue, and due to their restrictions the engines are generally MORE needy than normal GA aircraft.
Interesting! How so?
> Part 103 compliant aircraft are meant to have limits low enough to be LESS immediately lethal, but they are still dangerous.
What do you have in mind?
Quite a lot of what worries me when I fly involves misjudging the combination of weather with the aircraft's capabilities & my capabilities. Time under the care of a good instructor helps a whole lot with that judgement: you get to see a whole bunch of conditions that are beyond your capabilities & struggle with them, without endangering yourself or the aircraft. And (e.g.) winds variable 13-23, 3G12 on runway 09 is not so trivial, even if your aircraft has a 15kt crosswind limitation.
Or---I fly gliders, and I've had it drummed into my head that you never ever fly between trees when you're landing in some random field, because there may be a power line and power lines are a great way to kill yourself.
There are a thousand things like this, that are more about environment & pilot than aircraft.
(FWIW I've flown power in the past, but mostly fly gliders now; still newish. Maybe that skews my perceptions a bit; glider pilots are pretty willing to fly in windy or gusty conditions, in search of ridge or wave lift, so it's not so uncommon that I'm standing there asking myself "sure, the much more experienced pilots are fine to fly in this, but am I fine?" This is really hard! I'm really grateful to my instructors for giving me knowledge & experience with which to make that decision, and for giving me good training to fall back on if I misjudge!)
> Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation.
Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further—pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s.
From my shallow study of fatal and non-fatal GA accidents, there is hardly ever such a combination of life-or-death urgency and absence of alternative transportation options besides flying that could justify risking one’s own life and lives of one’s passengers by wilfully or accidentally ignoring weather forecast, and yet too often that appears to be the case.
It’s not a pleasure to talk about incidents like that, but “all plane crashes are pilot error” strikes me as a decent framing of the situation to adopt as a pilot when considering a risky flight.
>Planes gliding to a safe landing after losing power isn't something anyone should be harboring disbelief of to begin with. I've experienced it twice myself.
You must have been really lucky.
Sure, planes are perfectly capable of gliding to a safe landing after losing power. The problem is that there usually isn't a safe place nearby on the ground to land them at. So instead of a smooth, safe landing on some tarmac, they have a horrible crash-landing onto some kind of ground, if they're lucky. If they're not lucky, there's only mountains around and they just crash into them.
The nice thing about helicopters losing power is that a helicopter only needs a very small patch of level ground to land safely. Airplanes need an airstrip of some kind, and big airplanes need really long ones. Usually, if they're lucky, there's a decently straight highway close by.
>> The pilot is speaking about failed engine after the collision, like it is nothing. Fascinating. I'd be shouting something obscene in such a situation. For half an hour at least, I think.
When you get your medical clearance, one of the things they look for is signs of psychological issues or instability. Not saying that's you, and I bet you'd do better than you think. Pilot training also IMHO makes you better at that stuff.
> Well once airborne, aircraft already fly themselves and do everything except the last 100 feet of landing already.
That's only if nothing goes wrong. On the other hand, if the airplane I'm in loses both its engines and has to land on the Hudson River[1], I'd much prefer to have an experienced pilot and copilot in the cockpit.
It often is, actually. They have more than one engine precisely for that scenario, and can fly quite well with one down. Flights over water are also carefully planned based on distance to the nearest airport with an engine out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
Even if you lose all four on a 747, there’s surprisingly large amounts of time to troubleshoot if you’re at cruise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
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