UA 777 engine cowling comes off in flight

Wow! Okay.

 

Fan blade loss is always a big deal. That is the bad one I mentioned where the engine takes out the cowling. Delta lost a passenger to a fan blade loss, probably others, too. I hate sitting next to the red line on the cowling that shows where the fan blades come out if one departs.

 

Man, I agree with Terry....I will ask for another seat if I am beside any rotating mass. I especially hate sitting beside a giant prop being spun by a turbine. I was chatting with a friend of mine about twenty years ago...he always had a radio on him as he was a volunteer fire fighter. The radio popped on and the dispatcher informed him that an inbound 737 had shed a bunch of guts out of one engine over the outskirts of our city....terrifying. It landed safely and it was a contained explosion.

 

I don't know what "my pilot friends " think of UAL 232. I just know that the UAL pilots did what they had to do at the time to keep the airplane flying per company and Boeing procedures! They did all that they could do and what they had to do to save the airplane and passengers! They didn't have time or resources to do a structural analysis of the airplane at the time. They shut the engine down quickly and got everybody home. As for my "friends", they are professionals, one of whom has 30 years of un-blemished time , and the rest are near that ! How dare you to demean them from their stated decisions based on what they were presented with! A lot of pilots in deteriorating conditions work at one thing first, keep things flying.Then, identify the problem, cope with the problem, and keep things flying. Of course, you already know all this like everything else.

 

You have to sort of guess... the red line is on the exterior of the fuselage on military aircraft. Most commercial planes don't have it....

 

Response on page three.

 

On half or more of the 737s I fly on, the red line is on the cowling.

 

Yes...

 

Older red line. Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Bob- On the recips, that line really had some meaning if she was running. At least on a turbofan, the blade had to come off to kill you.

 

Yeah, Terry, I agree. At Hondo when all the airplanes were cranked up for the training sessions it was a bit dangerous and we had to watch everything when 20 airplanes were running up and moving out. One night a kid fell back when he was yanking a chock out of place and lost a part of one ear. How the prop missed the rest of him is a mystery.