Here's something you don't want to see happening to your plane's engine when you look out the window

[Wanderfound]

@Faffenreffer

If it’s functioning as a jet powered shredder

[Wanderfound]

@MrShiv

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.

About twenty years ago, I was working as a builder’s labourer on a job adding an extra floor to one of the airport fire stations.

They had me up on the tin roof in the pouring rain (no safety gear, of course) scrubbing rust off the metal with an industrial scouring pad. While I was up there, a passenger jet came in with an engine on fire.

It was probably actually a few hundred feet, but it looked like it flew about twenty feet above my head.

The fire station was cool; the trucks looked like something out of a Thunderbirds episode. No piddly little hand hoses; giant roof-mounted watercannon.

[joey_bladb]

@dorgar

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.

That particular engine, Pratt & Whitney JT8D-217, has a set of stationary inlet guide vanes which apparently kept the detached spinner cone from coming into sustained contact with the fan blades. Part of the spinner is still making contact with the blades underneath, however, which is causing the sparking.

I have no idea why the center hub is glowing orange. That could be the front bearing for the low-speed compressor shaft which might have gotten damaged when the spinner detached – probably an oil line got severed.

I’d be certain that enough metal debris made its way into the compressor and turbine cases that they’ll have to do a full overhaul replacing all the nicked and damaged blades, of which there are many hundreds. They will remove every single blade in the engine and then inspect.

Blade-off tests are just … insane. You get an idea how much energy jet engines produce. And even then, destructing power plants will still occasionally throw shrapnel into the fuselage, like that Southwest incident a year or two ago.

Still, flying is a very safe form of transportation.

(edit)

IIRC in some models of turbojets, the front bearing lubrication system is literally housed in the inlet cone, which is stationary (hence not really a spinner), so if that’s the case with this engine, then it would explain why that sucker is glowing orange.

[dorgar]

Intersting info. I don’t have that sort of in depth knowledge on the specific engine. As you said, it’s still a remarkably safe way to travel. I’m way more concerned about driving than flying. That said, looking out the window and seeing that would have lead to a bit of internal tension.

[moortaktheundea]

In some ways this is actually a reassuring video. The people in it were able to make panicked social media posts and then land safely. Properly built modern planes are have a lot of redundant safety systems and are pretty amazingly safe.