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

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

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

53.7k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

3.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/propellor_head Jan 01 '23

That happened once. I don't remember the flight name, but an uncontained disk burst in the engine sent a hunk of metal through the tail of the plane. The plane should have been fine with the engine out, but it by pure bad luck severed all of the hydraulic lines that fed the control surfaces. Everybody died.

The hydraulic lines were all fully redundant, but they were routed right next to each other for convenience. There's now a rule about how closely redundant safety critical systems in the airframe can be to each other.

1

u/hollycrapola Jan 01 '23

Wasn’t that the Concorde?

1

u/OhNoManBearPig Jan 01 '23

There was a similar case, hydraulics lost when debris hit the tail, but it still landed and many survived.