There is no reason to believe Boeing or the FAA are at fault here. The plane performed as designed and was able to safely return to the airport with no injuries. Boeing's design and construction did what it was supposed to do, FAA procedures were followed, everyone walked away safely.
There have been three significant airliner engine failures in 72 hours. All aircraft survived. All are Boeing; 777 (Denver), 747 (Maastricht) and 737 (Makassar.)
That's a lot of engine failures. It's hard to find a common mode here, other than they're Boeing, which is next to meaningless; the engines and airframes are all very different.
Still, it's hard to overcome instinct. "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
(It's a quote from Ian Fleming; I'm not suggesting any sort of 'attack,' only that some common mode phenomenon could be in play)
We get 4 or 5 and we're going to have to look at this really hard. If I had a gun to my head when asked what is going on I would speculate that perhaps these engines need more scrutiny before returning to service after a long COVID-19 hiatus. But then I don't actually know if that was even the case for any or all of the engines involved.
Hit the nail on the head here. The bigger problem isn't that there was an engine failure or even a blade off failure. The problem is that the containment failed. An engine is designed to lose a blade, have the cowling and engine frame contain the damage and land safely. When that containment fails, the damage and potential for catastrophe increases exponentially.[Edit - Spelling]
The engine lost its shrapnel barrier. It it had managed to ingest debris, the fans could have blown their way through the fuselage, killing anyone in the line of fire. Something is to blame for an event that is never supposed to happen.
There is no indication this is a Boeing issue. First off the Boeing 777 has been in widespread service for about 25 years. Secondly Boeing doesn’t make engines, companies like GE and Rolls Royce and P&W do. And lastly, this is most likely the result of a United mechanic making an error of some kind while performing maintenance on the aircraft. Let’s wait for investigations to complete before jumping to conclusions.
You don't know that. The mechanic could have been following a P&W procedure that did not account for some wear in the engine. Is that mechanic even a United employee or P&W or a contractor? The mechanic could have installed the wrong part. It could have been a totally random part failure. I can go on. There's too many possibilities to speculate at this point. Reports say the engine was vibrating before the cowling came off. That could be caused by many factors. It could have been a bird strike. The plane in front could have lost an engine or tire and this one sucked up FOD. We just do not know yet. The plane landed, the engine will be inspected.
I don’t know that, but with the present lack of information I was venturing a low information guess simply because the aircraft is otherwise very reliable in all its variants. In any case it looks like groundings are currently being ordered only for 777s with the P&W engines because they uniquely have hollow fan blades.
Bird strikes generally do not cause engines to explode. The 777 engines in particular were specifically designed to be survive ingestion of frozen turkeys.
Yeah but I bet they don't test the engine by throwing the turkeys in while its actually flying. Could easily be bird strike broke a fan blade that damaged the outer cowlings enough that they broke off/apart due to airspeed. From what I understand these engines use a unique hollow fan blade; so it could also just be an early/unexpected failure.
I wonder why you would freeze the turkey before throwing it in. Surely their aren't frozen birds that size flying around. It's like shooting a man.. before throwing him out an airplane.
They froze the turkeys to make them easier to fire out of their pneumatic cannon at several hundred miles per hour. (I saw this on a documentary about the 777 on TV, and I can't find the clips on YouTube).
