Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire United Flight lands safely after engine drops parts

Article is wrong. Broomfield is suburb of Denver metro area and west of the airport

Didnt matter anyway, did it. How was she?

Optimists see the glass half-full
Pessimists as half-empty..

Strange, because I'm normally a pessimist. It all depends which airline it is. After the major US, EU, Qantas, ANZ and maybe a few others, I really don't trust a lot of airlines. None in Africa, one in South America, maybe a couple in Asia. Just my personal views...

If one's goes to the smaller turbo_props NTSB
data shows multi-engine are 4x as likely to
result in death/serious injury than a single
like PC-12.

Many folks see it as illogical without knowing
the practical and technical reasons why.

Question for CrowHunter....

Worst case scenario 777 enroute to Hawaii engine goes out 1,000 miles off shore, how is fuel consumption/range affected when flying on one engine?

In that scenario what would be the best altitude/speed for conserving fuel?

Your optimum altitude is dependent upon several things, winds and the weight of the airplane being the biggest, we try to cruise near the optimum altitude for fuel efficiency. If you lose an engine at cruising altitude the airplane won't maintain that altitude single engine, you're going to have to descend. The optimum single engine altitude and airspeed, we call them driftdown, are going to be lower and slower. How much depends on weight and winds. Generally with the 777 if you're at 35,000' or so and you lose an engine you'll have to descend to the mid 20's and slow down some. The exact numbers were determined by Boeing when they conducted all the test flights, there are charts for it and it's built into the FMS, the aircraft's computer. You'd go into the FMS to get the altitude and airspeed then descend and slow to what it calls for.

It's going to burn more fuel for a couple of reasons, the first one being that you're lower and that always burns more fuel. Secondly you've now got a dead engine hanging out there that's costing you drag, plus the asymmetric thrust means the rudder is going to be deflected some to keep the plane in balanced flight which means more drag, more drag takes more fuel to overcome.

ETOPS flight plans are built around an ETP (equal time point), that's a point between the two alternate airports that's halfway timewise between the two. It's not half the distance (unless there's no wind), it's based upon flight time. That ETP is the most fuel critical point for an engine failure to occur, if an engine failure happens there then that's where you'll have the longest time to go to get to an alternate airport. The fuel planning is very complex and done by computer, one of the things it looks at is the required fuel if an engine failure happened at the ETP, it'll calculate how much fuel is required to driftdown and get to an alternate with the required reserves of fuel. The flight won't be allowed to take off unless it's carrying enough fuel to fly from takeoff to the ETP, lose an engine, then driftdown and make it to the alternate with sufficient reserves. Since the ETP is the worst place fuel wise for a failure to occur, any place either side of that means you have more fuel than you need. In your hypothetical scenario of losing an engine 1000 miles offshore enroute to Hawaii the flight would have left it's departure airport with enough fuel for that to happen and proceed safely to it's alternate airport, they couldn't legally take off without the fuel for it.

Yeah D
You should have said stuffed crust .....

The only thing really amazing about this story is that it doesn't happen 100X's a day.

How they keep those hunks of schit in the sky like they do is beyond me.

Flave has done all.

Flave has seen all.

Long live Flave.

It’s rare, but does happen...I was in a window seat on the wing flying out of Las Vegas at night. Just as we were leveling off the engine flamed, and blew. A lot a flames for a couple minutes.

Plane tilted to my side, then the pilot over compensated the other direction, then the plane settled.

Pilot hit the comms telling everyone we had lost an engine and would be returning back to the airport. Not a big deal.

Free drinks were on the next flight. Like I wasn’t already hammered.

LOL

🦫

Really interesting insight and information - thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the rest of the story.

Since TSA started getting gropey and making customers jump through microwave hoops with their shoes off and superman x ray vision, I stayed away from airports.
If it were just this risk, I'd still fly, but think twice and pray thrice.

Yep, not just here but in all those other countries that host an airline, especially given the proven mediocrity of some of their pilots. One would expect that would describe their maintenance departments too.

Good to know, tks.

I just found out that the person who filmed the engine burning is an acquaintance of mine.

Thanks for sharing that inside knowledge.

Even with it shut down, the air goin' through making the fan spin and the entire engine wobble... Lucky it didn't break off entirely... Good job by the pilots et al...