Southwest Airlines Emergency Landing at PHL

Looking at the photos it appears that the leading edge slats were damaged from flying debris. Would be interested in seeing the fuselage, too. That fan case sure tore up the nacelle before it left.

 

That altitude graph shows it descending up to 3700 ft per min wow! That alone must have freaked out the pax.

 

ATC memes put a compilation (serious) of all the ATC coms who dealt with swa1380



Very sad there was one fatality, but it could have been much worse
Gre by both pilots and controllers

 

To me it looks like the shattered window would have been several rows behind the expected route of the shrapnel from the engine.

 

This whole thing restores faith that there are lots of good honest people doing the right thing everyday.

 

I agree with you completely!

 

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Thanks for posting these photos. There has to be some issues with maintenance here. The CMF is a good engine and somebody is dropping the ball.

 

Aha! I was right. So just sitting in the plane of the compressor fan is not the only dangerous place to sit.

 

I'm with you. It looks like the fan blade is not the only problem if it causes the entire fan case to disintegrate.

 

I read once that the GE CFM was the most commonly used airliner engine... and one of the most reliable.
SW has a great safety record.

 

That’s a flight idle descent in the 73...no big deal.

 

SWA maintenance is top notch. 4,000 flights a day...things are bound to happen. If anything, CFM has the issue. Uncontained failures are not supposed to happen...

 

I always avoid seats adjacent to the fan blades, but that sure did not help the Wells Fargo lady from Albuquerque.

 

Metal fatigue in one of the fan blades in this CFM-56 engine is the likely culprit for the engine failure. SW is doing a rampant maintenance check on all it's CFM-56 engines.

 

I don't avoid the seat by the blades but it always crossed my mind. Any idea how this entered the plane so much further back?

 

Does this depressurization trigger and EDM response from the aircraft? Our jets have an EDM mode where loss of cabin pressure triggers the auto pilot to command a long spiral downturn to a safe altitude (breathable air) and automatically a EDM emergency squawk on the transponder. This is in case the pilots are not conscious.

This seemed more like a flight idle / controlled decent to nearest safe airport but I wonder if the loss of cabin pressure triggers automatic responses in the aircraft?

ATC seemed to just be aware of engine out/ engine fire?

I also noticed the pilot asked for a single frequency but still had to change frequencies a few times to get on the ground.

EDM= emergency decent mode.

 

first fatality in US commercial aviation in almost a decade (February 2009). that's incredible.

 

here is a photo of the fan with a missing blade NTSB is reporting that it was blade 13 that failed.

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It looks like the missing blade is located at the NTSB inspector's right elbow. Also, the next adjacent blade appears to have a bend in it.

 

No, we do not have that on our planes.

 

What is interesting is that the blade that left went forward a lot more than is typical before it exited the engine. Note that the fan containment ring that is supposed to catch the blade is still there, the blade went forward as opposed to going radially outward. Considering the blade centrifugal forces you would expect it to go radially outward, but it obviously missed the containment ring. We had a similar thing occur when developing an engine at Pratt back in the 70's. In that case a "stub" stage (LP supercharging stage behind the fan), failed and went forward, around the splitter between the fan and core flow, and then went down the fan duct. The engine started vibrating so we shut it down and the blade was missing, lost it at the root.. We had always assumed that if we lost a blade in that stage it would have gone down the core and destroyed the core, but that isn't what happened. There's a lot of forward force on a fan blade and depending on how it lets go it can twist and obviously "fly" forward more than you would think. Once it got ahead of the containment ring, there wasn't much to slow it down. After it damaged the cowl, the cowl got torn up due to the force of the slipstream. When testing engines for containment, you have do demonstrate that you contain the blade. This is typically done by pre drilling a blade root or disk lug and then using a heater or other means to fail the attachment. Invariably the blade goes pretty much radially although the containment ring does extend a distance ahead of the blade to account for the tendency of the blade to "fly" forward. This failure is different than any that I've seen in that the blade went a lot further forward than is typical of a fan blade failure.

 

Not equipped with that.

 

I don't understand it either. The fan itself is otherwise undamaged, as is probably the rest of the engine. Maybe the containment blankets will have to be extended to the front of the cowls.

 

First one in SW history.