You’ve likely heard about the Southwest flight last week that experienced a booming engine failure while at altitude and maybe you have seen some of the crazy photos of the dead player hanging under the wing of the craft both while it was still flying and on the ground. No one was hurt and the Boeing 737 while diverted, landed safely much to the relief of everyone involved. Commercial planes are designed to be able to carry on with one engine for situations just like this. As the old adage goes, you can never have too much fuel, too much altitude, or too many engines. In this case, two was the right number.
The National Transportation Safety Board has begun investigating the failure and trying to determine exactly what caused it. One of the concerning things is that this is considered an “uncontained” failure meaning that the outer part of the engine was impacted. There are lots of YouTube videos out there that show turbine engines being destructively tested on stands and physically blown up to test the integrity of the outer layer of the engine. This one lost a lot of forward cowling and other pieces that would be helpful to investigators had they been able to view them.
Of course there are people already claiming it was contact with an alien craft that caused this (we’re serious) but we’ll go out on a limb and suggest a more mundane answer. The NTSB is pretty bad ass when it comes to this stuff and they are incredibly thorough so we’ll be interested to see what they have to say after concluding what will probably be a rather lengthy investigation.
The engine we’re talking about was a CFM56 which is a joint venture project with American variants being built by GE. It is one of the most widely used turbine engines in the world and they have been on the market since the late 1970s. This particular engine had some 22,500 hours of total work on it but realize that they are regularly serviced and overhauled at intervals as well.
Here’s some photos of what passengers saw when the left side of the plane made a big, bad noise. Oh…I am writing this in an airport. HA!
I would really like to hear the NTSB conclusion but figure by the time they have it fully investigated it won’t make the news =/
I find it interesting that the turbine is still there, and spinning, and would be surprised if a failed blade not only went forward but took out that much metal and cowling. My only untrained thoughts are something fairly solid hit the engine, but what?
Unless of course there is a whole fan, shaft, etc missing, then that is really disconcerting!
Yes, it looks like the cowling was torn off ahead of the first compressor stage and most of the engine is still there, presumably minus a couple blades.
been an aircraft mechanic for 45 years. what you see is a nose cowl failure. what is seen spinning is the 1st stage of the compressor fan blades which look intact. if a fan blade had failed there would be a whole lot more damage than what you are seeing.
I wonder if a compressor stall or engine surging would cause that kind of damage.
Agreed, I see very little damage to the fan blades, nose cowl broke free for some reason.
This plane was probably worked on by some non A&P in South America where a lot of these planes get worked on now. Flyers beware…..
This reminds me of the Twilight Zone movie where a frazzled passenger sees a gremlin outside the window he’s sitting next to merrily ripping the plane’s wing and engine to bits.
Scary or what?