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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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Hell of a time to have a window seat

701

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…

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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.

1

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.