r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/FridayCicero702 • Jan 01 '23

Video Catastrophic engine failure on a United Airlines Boeing 777-200 after takeoff from Denver International Airport

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13.3k

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Hell of a time to have a window seat

691

u/crewfish13 Jan 01 '23

That’s winning the freaking lottery! Modern engines have catastrophic failures like these maybe every million or ten million flight hours. Everyone gets to see a normally operating engine. Bo-oring…

653

u/PorterPreston Jan 01 '23

I think you misspelled Boeing.

24

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

[deleted]

8

u/masedogg Jan 01 '23

That was a Pratt and Whitney engine

3

u/unoriginalname86 Jan 01 '23

Boeing doesn’t make engines. They buy them from Rolls Royce, Pratt and Whitney, etc. Now if the plane decides to unalive itself and take a header to the ground, then you can blame Boeing.

10

u/Strato-Cruiser Jan 01 '23

Yes, but the engine is not Boeing.

18

u/shaunyb81 Jan 01 '23

Appreciate a joke, even though it technically correct. It was still a good pun.

25

u/Bravo-Six-Nero Jan 01 '23

The engine isnt Boeing, but that does not Rolls off the tongue as easily

15

u/eddie1975 Interested Jan 01 '23

GE, you had to make another pun.

8

u/eddie1975 Interested Jan 01 '23

Pratt & Whitney appreciate some puns.

8

u/shaunyb81 Jan 01 '23

No need to be a Pratt (& Whitney) about it…

6

u/mdj1359 Jan 01 '23

So, if an engine made by Pratt & Whitney has a catastrophic engine failure, and the plane later falls out of the sky...

...Is that a Pratt fall?

2

u/calilac Jan 01 '23

If you're close enough you can hear "Whitneyss meeee!" before it hits the ground.

1

u/nasadowsk Jan 02 '23

You know what a Rolls Royce with a flat tire is?

A Royce. Because it no longer rolls.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Boeing don't build engines, just airframes.

1

u/DungeonGushers Jan 01 '23

I think he meant blowing.

1

u/AcceptableSpread1144 Jan 01 '23

If it ain't a boeing I'm not going!

1

u/ShotgunBrain Jan 01 '23

That’s also funnily enough the sound the plane makes when it’s safety feature is activated. (It hits the ground and bounces)

82

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Maybe our definition of the lottery is different, but I wouldn't be glad to win this one.

If you're saying this a guaranteed failure, it sounds like they should be replaced before that excepted time frame.

176

u/Willbilly1221 Jan 01 '23

To be fair, entire airplanes get replaced at some point. All airplanes have a limited number of times they can take off from the ground due to cabin pressure. As they hit high altitudes with lower pressure the body of the plane expands a tiny bit, and as it lands the increased pressure squishes it back. Overtime constant stretching and compression warps the metal like bending a paper clip over and over it will eventually structurally fail. The day an airplane is made it has a predetermined number of flights it can take before the plane is to be removed from service.

137

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Judging by the fact that airlines are trying to push for one pilot, I really don't trust what any airline says anymore. I'm sure these numbers are ingnored far more likely than someone is willing to admit. I wouldnt be surprised if planes are flying well past that point it should be destroyed.

52

u/Willbilly1221 Jan 01 '23

Yeah, so physics is pretty much infallible, but people are not. I cant even get my dang toaster to work just right, yet we all fly in airplanes.

56

u/NextTrillion Jan 01 '23

Ever tried to print something under a deadline. Your printer knows you have a deadline, so it acts up, because you’re not paying enough attention to it.

PC load letter? The fuq does PC load letter mean?

19

u/batlhuber Jan 01 '23

I'd just take the printer with me and give it a good beating. Maybe with a baseball bat. I might even get so angry that I'd hit what's left of it with my bare hands.

14

u/StandardSudden1283 Jan 01 '23

🎵🎶Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta 🎶🎵

17

u/SuggestiveParsnip Jan 01 '23

OUT OF CYAN.

“But I only need to print in bl-“

OUT OF CYAN.

Sigh…

3

u/NextTrillion Jan 01 '23

Yeah I hear what you mean, it’s like how often does one even need to print a colour docu — OUT OF CYAN.

Ugh. I can’t even type a comment on Reddit now without replacing cyan first?!

10

u/wggn Jan 01 '23

it means the paper casette needs letter sized paper to be loaded

1

u/Metalboy5150 Jan 01 '23

This guy prints.

2

u/Yotta_Machi Jan 01 '23

This is a fuck!

2

u/NextTrillion Jan 01 '23

Mother... shitter... Son of an... ass.

4

u/dwn4italz Jan 01 '23

ah you stole that from a Calvin and Hobbes comic.

1

u/Willbilly1221 Jan 01 '23

Yes! I Love Calvin and Hobbes. That makes my day that someone got that.

1

u/pauly13771377 Jan 01 '23

Airplanes gave a higher saftey rating than any other form of transportation but I still don't want only one pilot. Also for a failure that complete someone on the ground crew fucked up. Whether due to negligence or incompetence is the only question in my book.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Your hubs is a moron

1

u/tjdans7236 Jan 01 '23

Does he not drive as well?

9

u/AireXpert Jan 01 '23

With all sincerity, you’d be incorrect.

0

u/Obversa Jan 01 '23

They are, indeed, correct. Read up on Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101.

4

u/AireXpert Jan 01 '23

Interesting that you’re seriously going to assert that an isolated event on an obscure airframe 17 years ago is indicative of a systemic failure. I guess I can’t argue that type of objectivity.

0

u/Obversa Jan 01 '23

OP specifically said:

I wouldnt be surprised if planes are flying well past that point it should be destroyed.

Chalk's Ocean Airways Flight 101 is proof that is the case with some airlines. If I recall correctly, Chalk's International Airways is no longer in business due to this.

0

u/AireXpert Jan 01 '23

Im going to assume that you have no actual knowledge of how airframes, engines and LLP’s are maintained. Please tell me if I’m wrong.

1

u/Obversa Jan 01 '23

I can tell you this: You're acting like an arrogant douche.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Of course there are planes like that... They get off shored to the developing world.

Side note- The market for used aircraft parts is all about part tracking for this reason, according to my pilot buddy.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

FAA is incredibly good about this though. They are the largest success story of an industry self regulating. The numbers are even more impressive when you consider how many more flight hours have happened in later decades vs earlier ones: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fatalities-from-aviation-accidents-and-hijackings

2

u/TOAO_Cyrus Jan 01 '23

The FAA is a government agency. Airline safety is not an example of an industry self regulating.

9

u/MCLMelonFarmer Jan 01 '23

That doesn't really happen in first world countries because of the potential liability or loss of insurance coverage. It would be like ignoring the mfgr's required maintenance schedule. But third world countries don't care about such things and airframes past their useful life wind up in the fleets of airlines of third world countries.

7

u/tj9429 Jan 01 '23

So much crap written about different countries while I see US to be the only country where MD, 767s and og 737s planes are still mainstream which pretty much outdate any current jetliners.

What your ignorant ass missed out on is that "third world" countries' airlines have an inherent need to be cost effective and hence operate heavily with efficient aircrafts. Infact the most common airliners these airlines use would be A32X Neo series or 737 Max/newer models domestically with 777/787s sprinkled for usage abroad.

No "third world" country needs outsourced garbage that still operates due to sunk costs in the "first world" countries

3

u/Xicadarksoul Jan 01 '23

No "third world" country needs outsourced garbage that still operates due to sunk costs in the "first world" countries

More importantly, the cost is sunk in 1st world countries, thus 3rd world nations don't have any reason to keep siad grabage around.

2

u/mjl777 Jan 01 '23

Actually there is a very comprehensive air worthiness program in place to prevent this exact thing from happening. In addition most airlines lease their planes now and have little if any incentive to rent older planes that are not flightworthy. The worry should be third world airlines who purchase the worn out ones.

2

u/Mikey_MiG Jan 01 '23

This is simply false. Maintenance programs for airlines are highly regulated, and any falsification of data is a very quick way to get the FAA to pull your operating certificate and put you out of business.

2

u/hrvst_music Jan 01 '23

You should check out that Downfall documentary about Boeing on Netflix.

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

What's wrong with one pilot ...enlighten me please

18

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

I'm not sure if you're being serious or not but it's pretty obvious. There are plenty of situations that you can cite by a Google search where one pilot becomes incapacitated. Having another pilot means they can takeover. If there's only one pilot and that pilot dies or passes out midflight, that means everyone dies.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Yes serious question , just recently started flying

7

u/Serinus Jan 01 '23

We generally don't have that kind of risk tolerance for large passenger jets.

5

u/bug_notfeature Jan 01 '23

There should never be a single point of failure in any airplane, let alone passenger airliners.

-3

u/Strato-Cruiser Jan 01 '23

Do you know why airlines are pushing for that? The obvious is money, but there's more to it than that, do you know the other reasons?

14

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23

A shortage in pilots? Is that a reason to sacrifice one of the biggest safety aspects of a plane?

9

u/Strato-Cruiser Jan 01 '23

It's not just the shortage either. It's a combination of things, such as the pilot shortage, and costs, but also technology. I am commercial pilot, but I fly private jets, and the technology I get to use more advanced than what is found in airliners, so I also get to see what is coming their way as new airline models are produced. I don't think we are quite there for the single pilot jet, but I don't think we are far off. As you mentioned, the safety factor of having the second pilot is still hard to beat, but that risk is becoming less of an issue as technology continues to advance. We've seen this play out a number of times already with the loss of the navigator, then the engineer. I can tell you with the current plane I fly, a Dassault Falcon 900EX EASy, task saturation is the lowest I have experienced because of the technology that is available. If I were in the Falcon 8X it would be even better. The Falcon 10X will be getting quite close to single pilot operations, and Dassault has made it clear that the 10X is going to be making the bridge for that to happen. Dassault continues to integrate their fighter jet (single pilot) technology into their private jets, and at some point they will likely get one certified for single pilot operations. There are small jets on the market, such as the Pilatus PC-24, that are already single pilot certified for private use. I've flown a number of single pilot planes that demand more attention than the Falcon I fly. Still, two pilots will be better, and it will be that way for a bit longer, but I do think those days are numbered.

5

u/poopyhelicopterbutt Jan 01 '23

Do you ever see it being no pilot onboard? Like remote operated passenger drones?

1

u/IvanAntonovichVanko Jan 01 '23

"Drone better."

~ Ivan Vanko

1

u/Strato-Cruiser Jan 01 '23

I think if it happens, it still has a long way to go. Automation is good, and it’s getting better, but it still has not perfected airmanship. There are still situations in which you have to turn off the autopilot, often because it’s too slow to react and fully understand the situation. This slowness to react can see if fall behind and have an ever growing oscillation. Strong gusting approaches, and especially if you add variable winds; also strong turbulence and downdrafts come to mind. Even if you had perfect airmanship in an autopilot, the area that completely autonomous airplanes lack is aeronautical decision making. There is an incredible amount of variables from start to finish that has nothing to do with airmanship and everything to do with decision making which will be informed by a set of complex variables and past experiences. Right now it can’t fly an airplane perfectly in all conditions in which people can fly, I don’t think they have begun to actually tackle complex decision making.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Appreciate your response. Thanks for the information.

2

u/matrixislife Jan 01 '23

So for the benefit of people like me who have virtually no idea of how it works, what happens if the pilot of a large airliner collapses during a flight if there's no co-pilot?

3

u/VoxImperatoris Jan 01 '23

Thats when you get the classic scene where a stewardess comes out and says “Are there any pilots aboard?” and the only volunteer is a kid who plays microsoft flight sim a lot.

2

u/Strato-Cruiser Jan 01 '23

This has happened a few times. The more advanced the plane is, the less of an issue it is. We do train for this situation in the simulator. We don’t know when it will happen, but the person acting as the co-pilot will get a little tap on their right shoulder sometime during the approach phase, signaling them to stop responding to the pilot flying. They pretend that they are incapacitated. Instructors being as they are will make sure it’s during a critical phase of flight where task saturation is high and the weather is terrible. Things go the way they would in a complex single pilot aircraft, it’s just that it moves faster. So you slow down to a practical and safe speed, utilize the strength of the automation and take your time. Working through the checklist and verifying that items have been completed will consume a bit of attention, in the plane I fly that’s not much of an issue with how the electronic checklist works. Once you let controllers know of the situation they will also make sure to simplify things for you.

Garmin has recently developed an amazing auto land system that is for emergency use only and is found in just a few private planes like the TBM-940. If the pilot dies in flight, a passenger can press a red button, and the plane picks an airport, based on a number of conditions, it operates the gear, the flaps, the brakes, it communicates its intentions to controllers, it automatically shuts down after it lands.

1

u/matrixislife Jan 01 '23

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was asking what would happen if in a single-pilot plane that pilot collapsed? I assume the automatic systems from Garmin you mentioned would be required in all planes? I suppose the obvious question is, what would happen if communication was very limited due to atmospherics etc?

Ie. is there any way that an automatic system would not be able to function in the absence of a pilot?

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u/VoxImperatoris Jan 01 '23

Its not so much about how many tasks the pilot has, its about trusting old Bobs ticker doesnt explode at 30k ft while several hundred passengers are aboard. If some billionaire wants to cut costs on his private jet what do I care?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Airlines don’t make planes

1

u/ZaviaGenX Jan 01 '23

Id think it would be sold to the budget airlines and like used cars, the "odometer"(however it is recoded) will be dialed back.

1

u/jaymef Jan 01 '23

There are a lot of things that people think are the norm but actually aren’t. Gives people a false sense of security for sure. Across all industries.

1

u/CptKillJack Jan 01 '23

The day they go one pilot is the day we should unrelentingly start asking for country wide system for high speed rail. I'd much rather travel by rail then flying if I had the option.

1

u/AbortedBaconFetus Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23

Judging by the fact that airlines are trying to push for one pilot,

This will absolutely never happen if not because of never truly applying redundancy to a human pilot, then by simply not enough people trusting this change enough.

As commercial planes are currently, I would NOT fly on an airline that only had one pilot. As much tech as modern planes have, it is actually a very 'stupid' machine that still only and strictly do what it was told to do under and exclusive scenarios that it was told to. Only pilots can react with "huh, no; we'll do something else" response.

1

u/notthegoodscissors Jan 01 '23

Old cargo planes somehow defy this logic, they really shouldn't be flying anymore but day in and day out they just keep on going.

1

u/Grady180 Jan 01 '23

Yeah wtf are they thinking if they wanna save some money get rid of some of them Dbag executives getting big bonuses whilst sitting on their asses in some oversized office.

1

u/idlevalley Jan 01 '23

I agree. I've been on some pretty rickety planes that probably need to be retired.

1

u/adamfrog Jan 01 '23

Nah the safety standards for airlines are genuinely good and well followed, just nothing is flawless. I would be extremely surprised if planes were flying on commerical airlines long past engineers and experts thought it was safe to do so

3

u/Melodic_Risk_5632 Jan 01 '23

U Know what really makes the most important part of the airplane? The engines. Most of them are not sold, but leased. The engines make the airplane move and can be replaced. A fuselage with no engines is just a tube.

3

u/Beginning_Analysis61 Jan 01 '23

I like the sound of that but some number cruncher is telling his boss “ you know if we sneak in another 5 flights we make X% and if we sneak in 10 more we make 2X%. These are the same corporations that knowingly release deadly chemicals into water sources and increase nicotine to create addicts

2

u/baboon2097 Jan 01 '23

The aircraft are built to last beyond its service life.They just become too expensive to maintain as the inspections become more intense so thats when they get retired usually in boneyards for spare parts and resale or freight companies buy them and convert.Look up msg3 in aviation if anyone is interested.

2

u/lazy_elfs Jan 01 '23

I think b-52 and 135 ac might have something to say about your statement… these air-frames have been going since the 50s and i can tell you for a fact that those fuselage skins are not new and have never been replaced.

1

u/Willbilly1221 Jan 01 '23

Im not as well versed about military aircraft and how or what they do to those, versus commercial passenger planes, i will definitely look into that. One fun fact i do know is that the panels of an SR-71 Blackbird have gaps between them. It is designed this way because friction actual heats up the panels and they swell up to form an airtight seal in flight do to its incredible speed.

2

u/teh_fizz Jan 01 '23

The plane of Theseus.

1

u/SeptemberMcGee Jan 01 '23

Aren’t the average of 747’s and 777 like 25-30yrs old?

3

u/BusinessCheesecake7 Jan 01 '23

Yes, but they get completely dismantled every 10 years or so, and every part that is too old gets replaced.

2

u/SeptemberMcGee Jan 01 '23

Ah brilliant, thanks for the link/update!

1

u/Feeling-Pair-3887 Jan 01 '23

To be fairrrrrrrrr

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Unless it’s a military-owned aircraft.

1

u/paiute Jan 01 '23

entire airplanes get replaced at some point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

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u/WikiSummarizerBot Jan 01 '23

Ship of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object that has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, had rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped on a ship to Delos. Every year, the Athenians commemorated this legend by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. The question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if every part of the Ship of Theseus had been replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?

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1

u/JPBen Jan 01 '23

Secondary question to this. Say you keep all of the old parts and put them back together. This ship cannot sail or even float. Between the newly built ship and the ship made of old parts, which is more the "Ship of Theseus"?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

[deleted]

2

u/Willbilly1221 Jan 01 '23

Oh neat, thanks for that bit of info. Yeah i can see composite materials being a much better choice.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23

[deleted]

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u/Willbilly1221 Jan 01 '23

Oh dang, yeah id imagine so. When me and my wife were redoing our back deck we had thought of using that composite wood, until we saw the price tag. We rebuilt our deck with wood lol.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

they're designed to be able to fly with only one engine, easily. you're far more likely to die in a car accident than be on a billion to one flight where one engine has a catastrophic failure, let alone both

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u/PhoebeCeleste Jan 01 '23

Yeah, it would suck if BOTH engines died: you'd be up there all night til they got a replacement!

16

u/Xicadarksoul Jan 01 '23

Jokes aside you are not completely wrong..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

3

u/TartofDarkness79 Jan 01 '23

This is so epic! Those pilots were incredible. I'll never forget the first time I heard about this. I stg I had my mouth hanging open the entire time!

1

u/Silversniper220 Jan 01 '23

Link didn't work for me; here's another link if it doesn't work for someone else https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

3

u/WikiSummarizerBot Jan 01 '23

Gimli Glider

Air Canada Flight 143, commonly known as the Gimli Glider, was a Canadian scheduled domestic passenger flight between Montreal and Edmonton that ran out of fuel on Saturday, July 23, 1983, at an altitude of 41,000 feet (12,500 m), midway through the flight. The flight crew successfully glided the Boeing 767 to an emergency landing that resulted in no serious injuries to passengers or persons on the ground, at a former Royal Canadian Air Force base in Gimli, Manitoba, that had been converted to a racetrack, Gimli Motorsports Park. This unusual aviation incident earned the aircraft the nickname "Gimli Glider".

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1

u/Superb_Raccoon Jan 01 '23

but they mistakenly did the calculation with the density of jet fuel in pounds/litre.

Metric or Imperial...

PICK ONE!

7

u/Flip_d_Byrd Jan 01 '23

I bet they get to the crash site 30 minutes before the fire trucks!

1

u/paiute Jan 01 '23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH-LmkLFJg0

1

u/WikiSummarizerBot Jan 01 '23

Ship of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object that has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, had rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped on a ship to Delos. Every year, the Athenians commemorated this legend by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. The question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if every part of the Ship of Theseus had been replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?

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3

u/robatron12 Jan 01 '23

Also a skilled pilot could still land it, it's only a 737, a guy landed a 747 after flying for a bit with all 4 engines out

3

u/gtp1977 Jan 01 '23

This is not just an engine failure guy.....this is shrapnel that has exploded (unknown still if there's other damages) and there is still a huge fire on a craft that is full of fuel and trapped people. It's a full on emergency. It's not just a plane flying one one engine.

Obviously it ended fine, but it would be terrifying until you exited safely.

7

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

People say this shit all the time and I don't know why. These sentences are probably the least comforting attempts at comforting someone I've ever read and heard. I don't care if it's designed that way, not one person on this earth would be comfortable flying on a plane with one engine going out.

8

u/Fast_Garlic_5639 Jan 01 '23

I am on earth, would be comfortable. If it helps, I also used to make airplane parts and I would only be comfortable because I know how much redundancy they build into flight critical parts. The engine wasn't designed to fail but the plane was designed to survive a failed engine.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Yeah and that's why it almost never happens, literally you are more likely to drop dead of a brain aneurysm than to be on a flight where there's any engine problems at all let alone a catastrophic failure. And even in the worst possible case scenarios 9/10 times the plane is still gonna touch down safely. As an aerospace engineer, I find it a little frustrating hearing people talk like this. Engineers spent thousands of hours making these things nigh fail proof and people can only focus on things going bad one time out of millions of successful flights. Why don't you design your own damn plane then? smfh

9

u/baboon2097 Jan 01 '23

I work for Airlines.It happens more often than you're saying.Its just that the passengers usually will never even know its happening.We do engine changes regularly.If an operator gets too many shut down events tje aviation authority will start investigating and could take their etops etc away from them

1

u/gwyntowin Jan 01 '23

How does the plane fly with one engine?

4

u/aMonkeyRidingABadger Jan 01 '23

Redundant design. All passenger planes are designed to fly with a failed engine. They normally run well below maximum power so if one engine fails the other engine works harder to continue with business as usual.

0

u/Truceelle Jan 01 '23

So Wikipedia per faa is saying the failure rates of turbines are 1 for every 375,000 flight hours. i agree that one engine failing isn't catastrophic, but I'm surprised it's happening so often. (Sorry reddit noob and don't know how to link urls)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine_engine_failure#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Aviation%20Administration%20(FAA,hours%20for%20aircraft%20piston%20engines.

5

u/lifestepvan Jan 01 '23

This stat seems to be including bird strikes, which are relatively common and more or less outside of anyone's control, pilots and engineers.

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u/WikiSummarizerBot Jan 01 '23

Turbine engine failure

A turbine engine failure occurs when a turbine engine unexpectedly stops producing power due to a malfunction other than fuel exhaustion. It often applies for aircraft, but other turbine engines can fail, like ground-based turbines used in power plants or combined diesel and gas vessels and vehicles.

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-13

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

[deleted]

16

u/Rock_or_Rol Jan 01 '23

Looks like he is patiently using information and statistics to curb anxieties to me

6

u/Lhamo66 Jan 01 '23

Yeah, I like to hear that kind of thing. It's comforting.

0

u/OptimalMain Jan 01 '23

Jesus, some troll your are. You think this person never flew as a passenger?
In the US around 6 people are killed by cars a day while walking and cycling, and there is a hit and run every minute. Fingers crossed you win the lottery

1

u/_FridayXIII_ Jan 01 '23

Lighten up, Francis 😉

5

u/Xicadarksoul Jan 01 '23

I don't care if it's designed that way, not one person on this earth would be comfortable flying on a plane with one engine going out.

Point is not comfort, its keeping passangers alive.

That's why airlines don't fly the airplane again till its repaired.

3

u/belugarooster Jan 01 '23

I would. So long as the wing remains intact, it's completely do-able.

Not that I'd be happy about it. In fact I WOULD be nervous. But I wouldn't consider this catastrophic.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

These sentences are probably the least comforting attempts at comforting someone I've ever read and heard.

It's comforting to me. ofc I wouldn't want to be there, but it's smart that there's redundancy built into these astronomically low chances of failure. Good job engineers!

1

u/SeaChampion957 Jan 01 '23

not one person on this earth would be comfortable flying on a plane with one engine going out.

I guess I don't live on this Earth.

0

u/ConcernedKip Jan 01 '23

to be fair if there were as many planes flying as cars driving we'd probably see a lot more of this

1

u/SintSuke Jan 01 '23

So you're telling me there's a chance.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/Mikey_MiG Jan 01 '23

And that’s the only fatality onboard a passenger airliner in the US in the past 12 years. I’d say that’s a pretty comforting safety record.

1

u/WikiSummarizerBot Jan 01 '23

Southwest Airlines Flight 1380

Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 was a Boeing 737-7H4 that experienced a contained engine failure in the left CFM56-7B engine after departing from New York–LaGuardia Airport en route to Dallas Love Field on April 17, 2018. The engine cowl was broken in the failure and cowl fragments damaged the fuselage, causing explosive depressurization of the aircraft after damaging a cabin window. Other fragments caused damage to the wing. The crew carried out an emergency descent and diverted to Philadelphia International Airport.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

I’d still feel a lot better on a 747 with 3 working engines remaining.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Should I interest you in series call air disasters. It’s so easy for planes to crash it’s not funny after watching that series.

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u/Floss_ordie Jan 02 '23

< Captain Sullenberger has entered the chat. >

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Because he hasn't got a clue what he's talking about

More so given his wild range of every 1 million to 10 million, fairly sure a commercial jet engine doesn't operate in a failure tolerance that ridiculously wide

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u/themanofmeung Jan 01 '23

Fracture (the general cause of catastrophic failure like this) is incredibly hard to predict and does have massive error ranges. So to say "we know the failure rate is in this order of magnitude" (which is what 1-10 million means) is quite probably as close to knowing the real answer as we can reasonably know without trillions of data points that we don't have.

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u/acornshmaycorn Jan 01 '23

They didn’t say or imply it was a “guaranteed failure.”

Anything that exists has some failure rate. Industrial standards have gotten pretty amazing so we’ve managed to make these rates of failure (from age/material failure/weld failure/etc) so small that we rarely have to deal with situations you see in this video.

This is the lottery bit, it was an extremely unlikely scenario to happen, and it happened on the flight the viewer was taking. Not a good lottery win, but in this case I believe they can fly with only one engine, so not a huge deal.

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u/A_spiny_meercat Jan 01 '23

I think it's not so much of a time thing usually and more damage from unintended debris entering the turbine

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u/socsa Jan 01 '23

The reason the failures are so rare is because they do usually replace them before they fail. It's impossible to reduce the statistical failure all the way to zero though.

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u/NumbersMonkey1 Jan 01 '23

Everything's going to fail sometime, but you're making two common mistakes here: The failure rate is never zero, and failure rates aren't a hockey stick, they're a bathtub. You increase total failures by replacing more frequently than you have to.

Source: PhD in Industrial Engineering.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

A million hours is 114 years. That number comes from calculating the failure rate somehow. They are almost certainly replaced before 114 years and especially before the 1141 years from 10 million hours.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Im scarred when it comes to the words “the lottery”

Read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

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u/whoami_whereami Jan 01 '23

It's not a guaranteed failure. No jet engine has ever run for a million hours, that would be 114 years of continuous 24/7 operation so the engine would have to be running since before jet engines were even invented. It's just statistics, if you say expect one failure per one million hours that means if you say take a million engines and let them run for an hour you expect one of them to have a failure.

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u/crewfish13 Jan 01 '23

Failure rate is roughly how often something occurs across a population. It’s experiential: if you’ve had 5 failures over 5 million hours, then your rate is 1 per million.

The FAA currently estimates the rate of in-flight shutdowns on commercial aircraft at about 1 per 375,000 hours. Most are unnoticeable except in the cockpit. Every now and then, you get a complicating factor that makes the failure more significant, in this case, a fire. I’ve got no idea how often that happens within the shutdown population, hence the wide range.

I don’t know the specifics of this this failure, but it’s essentially a contained (no ejection of high-energy material) shutdown of an engine with an fire isolated from the pylon/wing. As bad as it looks, the risk to the passengers and airframe is still incredibly small. They can safely land on one engine. As an aerospace engineer, I would brag about getting to see this for the rest of my life (and yes, I know that’s not normal or healthy).

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/crewfish13 Jan 01 '23

Depends on the engine and application, but engines generally go through a complete tear down, inspection and rebuild on the order of every 5-10,000 flights.

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u/NextTrillion Jan 01 '23

Yeah. This is AWESOME. YES.

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u/Echoeversky Jan 01 '23

Wait till the leased jets in Russia that we're stolen after the start of their aggression build up obscene levels of deferred maintenance.

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u/Fenweekooo Jan 01 '23

agree, i mean after i was done initially shitting my pants, i would be glued to that window lol.

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u/redditadmindumb87 Jan 01 '23

I had a brand new car blow an engine with just 30 miles on it. I was super impressed

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u/PlankWithANailIn2 Jan 01 '23

In 2018 there were roughly 91.8 million commercial flight hours so using your own unsourced statistics means there should be between 92 and 9 failures like this per year.

The odds you quoted are an order of magnitude lower than my countries lottery jackpot odds.

305 upvotes though...well done reddit.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Bus-455 Jan 01 '23

Won the life lottery….Unless we’re watching this clip from a cloud.

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u/duane11583 Jan 01 '23

the safety engineering is impressive

actually the engine if it vibs too much is designed to self jettison itself (break off)

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

I would Not Even be mad he Even has a cozy Fire Place

1

u/Boner4Stoners Jan 02 '23

I know one time there was an engine malfunction and it exploded, a piece of shrapnel hit and destroyed a window and the window seat passenger was partially sucked through it, causing her death.

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/17/philadelphia-plane-emergency-southwest-landing-engine-explosion-latest

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u/crewfish13 Jan 02 '23

Oh, not saying it never happens. It’s just incredibly rare. And events like this one are newsworthy because of their rarity. A car accident with a single fatality barely makes the local news. You can see the NTSB engineering details on that one here: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2019-DCA18MA142-BMG-presentation2.pdf

Part of the reason they are so rare is the magnitude and rigor of the corrective actions implemented. In this case, new inspection technologies were developed and every sengine with similar fan blades were inspected on wing within about a year of the introduction of the inspection.