Air Asia X A330 paint mixer simulation

When the pilots asks the passengers to pray, its never a good sign!

Air Asia flight turns around after 'technical issue' - CNN.com

 

"A few years back an EK A330 suffered an engine failure (main fan blade separation during the climb at about 35000 ft) during departure from Lusaka, The crew shut it down, but the vibrations from the windmilling donk were so severe that the Captain told me he couldn't read any instrumentation, and thought that the engine would separate. They had 3 pilots on the sector and the augmenting FO had to do the landing performance calcs on the portable laptop, as the touch screen fixed EFB's were unusable. He said the vibrations only receded to comfortable levels when that slowed down with flap 2. "

This should be added to their shutdown in flight check list. Slow down and fly it with flaps 2 to the nearest airport and land. Not fly it at .80 for another 2 hours till more things rattle off.

 

I was going to ask why they didn't slow down, descend, and land ASAP???



Mark

 

When conducting ETOPs that may not be an option.

The structure is certified for these loads considering ETOPs. The successful conclusion to this event, an uneventful landing, confirms this, right?

 

Here is a picture of the missing blade of the fan.

Incident: AirAsia X A333 near Learmonth on Jun 25th 2017, engine shut down in flight after severe vibrations

 

My rationale would have been to land at the first airport after turning around. After looking at the flight path, he flew over the entire west coast of Australia to get back to Perth. I would not overfly a perfectly suitable airport.Sounds like he wanted to get the plane back to base for MX and flew over some perfectly good airports.

 

My question

Fake Chinese made fan blades?

 

Understood. I'm sure corporate/maintenance was telling the pilot to get it back to base. $$ to swap an engine at a remote location, and it was flying along just great with plenty of fuel.

 

Maybe it was a passenger throwing coins in the engine for luck...

Elderly flight passenger throws coins into engine for ‘luck’, delays take-off for hours

http://m.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2100242/elderly-flight-passenger-throws-coins-engine-luck-delays-take

 

I've wondered about the touch screens as everything is going here, GA included.

 

At 12:00 they discuss the process of making the fan blades. I have a feeling on this blade they had a speck of contamination that caused the failure. Titanium is a pain in the butt to work with and the smallest bit of contamination can end with deadly results.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfomloUg2Gw[/ame]

 

I remember the tests that were being run during the SST program to find out the best way to drill it.After running test after test they finally figured that the best way to drill it was to use a moderate speed with a lot of pressure and cooling lubricant. Tough material to mess with. I have a titanium test leading edge slat rib that was cut with numerical control machine and you can see deviations that you wouldn't see in a steel or aluminum rib.

 

I tried to machine Titanium a couple of times. The worst part if it is the fact that if you cant keep the part flooded with coolant it builds up and retains so much heat it is crazy. I have heard of even a few shops that had major fires break out because of not enough coolant and the chips getting to hot.

 

That's wild. I wonder how many components in that plane were prematurely loosened or damaged by the shaking?

 

Every single fan blade is worth as much as the average family car....as you watch this video you are amazed at the engineering, what he mind of man can conceive, he can achieve.

Here's the fan blade test segment. Equivalent to a one ton car being dropped off a 200 foot cliff.

https://youtu.be/VfomloUg2Gw?t=2447

 

I seem to remember that Peter Revson's fatal crash at Kyalami in '74 was due to Shadow experimenting with titanium in the suspension. Because the components had not been machined properly, they were severely weakened and failed. Reading this post reminded me of that long-ago tragedy.

 

Malaysia Airlines screens prayers before take-off | Free Malaysia Today