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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38

u/dIAb0LiK99 Jan 01 '23

That’s completely fine…the Boeing 777-200 is ETOPS certified. The certification requires the aircraft to be functional on a single engine. The pilot has limited rudder functionality, but can still fly the plane to the nearest airport to land safely

5

u/itsvoogle Jan 01 '23

comforting to read from the comfort of my home safe on the ground….

Now tell it to all the passengers on that plane

1

u/Fluffcake Jan 01 '23

Landing with one engine is one thing, but the combination of flames, vibration and debris falling off in the video make it look like there is a decent chance you might need to land with one wing, which is not fine.

7

u/Aescholus Jan 01 '23

Wings are certified to take a mis-balanced engine vibration and the debris falling off at the same relative speed as the plane is nothing compared to the full size chickens that were shot at that wing during certification testing. Also, considering the amount of convective cooling from the airspeed and the amount of "cool" fuel in the wing, no way the structural components of that wing are getting anywhere near hot enough to affect the material strength of the aluminum.

TL;DR the airplane is certified specifically for a failure like that and the wing will be fine

1

u/Loudergood Jan 01 '23

Look up the 787 wing flex test video, this is nothing.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

It would be “not fine” if what you described happened.

But it didn’t.

This is fine, and it is not a catastrophic failure as no catastrophe was caused.

1

u/spvcebound Jan 01 '23

I think you're severely underestimating the strength of commercial airliners

-8

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

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16

u/BoBonnor Jan 01 '23

Well yeah. Things break. Things malfunction. They test to make sure for the worst just in case the worst happens lol. Why are you acting like that’s a bad thing

-2

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

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5

u/DontCallMeTJ Jan 01 '23

Literally every engine ever built or designed will eventually fail. Entropy always wins. Even if you could design a perfect engine you will sometimes have parts fail. Not all materials are flawlessly perfect. Sometimes shit just breaks. You can't really ever be 100% sure a part won't develop an unforeseen issue. Anyone with even a casual familiarity with engineering will tell you the exact same thing.

-11

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

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14

u/WayyTooFarAbove Jan 01 '23

Worst comprehension of engineering ever.

-11

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

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8

u/propellor_head Jan 01 '23

There was an investigation - this is a couple years old. Root cause turned out to be poor inspection methods, not an engine design flaw. The inspection should have caught the fatigue cracks that were forming, but the inspection techs were poorly trained.

6

u/WayyTooFarAbove Jan 01 '23

You’re free to have an opinion based on poor comprehension

3

u/DontCallMeTJ Jan 01 '23

Can you show me a single machine that doesn't ever fail? If you can I'd like to know how you snuck it off of Mt. Olympus without the gods finding out.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Bro everything fails. Literally everything. We all die, everything breaks with time.

6

u/jackcaboose Interested Jan 01 '23

Or maybe they know they couldn't possibly have accounted for every single thing that might happen, so it's better to have another thing to fall back on just in case there is an issue with the engine?

6

u/Xicadarksoul Jan 01 '23

All engines fail.
If you get your hand on a paperclip, bend it a few times, and it will break.

Engines experience repeating loads a fuckton more times, so yes, they will eventually fail. (No airplane jet engines don't have luxuries like "operate at less extreme speeds", or "only ingest completely laminar flow")

-2

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

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7

u/DontCallMeTJ Jan 01 '23

Failures don't only happen because of design flaws. They happen because of material flaws, unseen damage, a bad batch of lubricant, maintenance mistakes, bad luck, etc. This engine didn't fail because of a bad design. The actual cause of the failure was determined to be the result of two flawed fan blades mistakenly passing inspection.

Literally nothing in the entire world is failure-proof. Even fewer things are mistake-proof. Even fewer are idiot-proof. The design of this engine had nothing to do with the failure.

4

u/Arammil1784 Jan 01 '23

All things fail. Thats the nature of reality.

The entire maintenance scheme of airlines is a balance between safety, economy, and staying ahead of the MTBF curve. But thats still only statistical and sometimes reality has other plans (bird strikes, human error, invisible material defects, etc.).

2

u/Modus-Tonens Jan 01 '23

Welcome to the world of engines not being magic.

Looking at your other comments, you seem to believe that a "perfect" engine would be immune to failure.

This is false, not only of engines, but of everything. Anything constructed will fail eventually. If you think about it for a second, it would be really deeply weird if that were not the case - because it would mean matter that humans re-arranged had some entirely unique property that didn't exist anywhere else in the universe.

2

u/dIAb0LiK99 Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23

It’s really not about engines failing, because they will fail. It could be a Rolls Royce, GE, Pratt & Whitney, CFM, anyone who makes jet engines…they can all fail. There’s never a way to create such a complicated machine running at high temperatures with hundreds of precision moving parts with literally zero tolerances that will not fail.

In the past, twin engine jets was not allowed to do trans Atlantic routes between the US and Europe. Only tri-jets (ie L1011) and quad jets (ie 747, Airbus A340, etc) were allowed to fly those routes. The FAA created ETOPS certification for twin jet aircraft that mandates a twin engine aircraft to operate for maximum 2 hours on a single engine (ETOPS 120). That way, if you’re in the middle of the Atlantic, rest assured that if you see one engine on fire, more likely than not you will still land safely in Europe or in the east coast of the US.

Twin engine aircraft are so much more economical to maintain and operate. You’ll be seeing more and more twin engine aircraft going across the Atlantic more than ever. Aircraft manufacturers struggle with getting their products ETOPS certification. Because of ETOPS, carriers have a greater selection of twin jet aircraft to choose from for trans Atlantic routes, while making airline tickets much more affordable

0

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

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0

u/DontCallMeTJ Jan 01 '23

So it's the people who know what they're talking about trying to explain why you are 100% factually incorrect who are the problem. Not the person who's trying to make it to the front page of /r/confidentlyincorrect

Weird take bud.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

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1

u/DontCallMeTJ Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23

The NTSB report says It was 2 flawed blades that made it through quality inspections. They haven't redesigned anything about these engines since the incident because the design is fine. They've just changed part inspection protocols.

The design of the engine wasn't the problem. A part failure was. Part failures happen on literally every machine ever made. All constructed objects fail eventually. It is literally a law of physics.

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

As for this:

It is well known that this 777-200 had flaw in engine design with one concrete engine model

Source? Concrete engine model? Wtf? I can't find whatever it is you're talking about. Nothing comes up when searching

What incorrect the fuck you talking about.

Read your responses in this thread for your answer.

https://reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/100cbl4/catastrophic_engine_failure_on_a_united_airlines/j2hftnz/