When I was 14 months old, on April 8, 1967, my parents and I were on Eastern Airlines Flight 63 from Kennedy to New Orleans when the engine caught fire shortly after takeoff. The pilot, Capt. David Vaughter, turned around and landed safely. Amazingly, all the passengers were back on their way within two hours. There happened to be a photographer at the airport who managed to get some photos, which were published a couple weeks later in LIFE magazine.
I was evidently the youngest of the 106 persons aboard. My mom said the photographer took pictures of me, but for some reason LIFE magazine passed on those. I probably slept through the whole thing.
Worry: looking out your window and seeing that.
Real worry: then looking across the plane and seeing the people there looking out their windows and pointing.
But in the intervening time before the flight crew became aware of the problem and shut down the engine, A LOT could’ve gone wrong. The blade clearances in the engine’s compressor section are amazingly tiny, and ingestion of small debris like small screws accidentally left behind by maintenance workers have shredded jet engines. Separation of compressor and turbine blades during powered operation have led to a couple of high profile incidents.
That video is absolutely terrifying to me… thinking through all of the scenarios.
Not sure how that’s handled in commercial aviation, but in the USAF we did periodic “FOD walks” to hunt down anything on the flightline that could be ingested by an engine.
Most airlines have a specific “walk around” procedure which includes inspecting engines for debris or for just stuff looking out of place etc. I’m wondering if this could’ve been caught by firmly grasping and shaking the spinner to see if it was loose. Tail-mounted engine nacelles, however, are inaccessible w/o a ladder. IIRC, B-727 and MD-80 engines were mounted aft of the rear entrances (service crews using those doorways used big yellow plastic covers to keep from dropping debris into the engine), so you could probably have a gander. On the ERJs and CRJs and the emerging panoply of short-haul rear two-holers you can’t really.
But incidences of loose spinners seem rare. Most catastrophic engine failures are foreign object ingestion, or metal fatigue/cracking. No doubt some guy in maintenance is going to get chewed out.
Funny thing is, my parents & I never knew the photos had been published in LIFE until pretty recently.
Back in 2007, the New York Times digitized their entire archive, so I went to see if I could find any story about the incident. My folks couldn’t remember the exact date, and got some other details wrong, but I eventually found the story: NYT jet engine fire.pdf (38.7 KB)
Then, maybe 3-4 years ago, I thought about Googling the pilot’s name. By that time, Google had scanned and tagged a bunch of old magazines & other ephemera. I was astonished to find these photos. My parents, from a different time, could hardly believe it.
I’d also like to turn that around. There is a part of the impeller bouncing around against the blades, and nothing has gone kablooey yet, and the engines had to pass a"blade off" test as well.
(I’d be nervous as hell if that was my flight though, and I’d probably be trying to casually point out to an attendant that it needs the flight crew’s attention right the fuck now.)
