The Boeing 767, carrying 9 crew members and 226 passengers, was on its way to Atlanta. Pilots had to turn around due to a problem with the left engine.
Was it just surging or like a compressor stall or something? FOD like a bird ingestion or something?
I mean, Boeing has/had quality problems, serious ethical failures, but also birds exist.
(I’m not good at explaining this, maybe should have found an explanation online somewhere instead.) You know those stages of a combustion engine - intake, compression, ignition, exhaust, all happening in sequence in an engine’s cylinders? Turbine engines do them too, but in a straight line and constantly. The front of the engine is obviously intake, but compressor fans do the compression just using fast and powerful fans, no seals or valves needed. Ignition lights everything up, exhaust can just flow out the back. (It flows over some more fan blades that steal some power from the expanding gases and use it to keep the whole thing spinning.)
Unless something goes wrong with the compressor fan blades, that is. If compression is too weak and the ignited air/fuel mixture can flow back out the front of the engine, that’s bad. And yeah, it happens sometimes, with any engine. Almost never with both at the same time. (Both engines failing at once low to the ground is like a once in a generation thing, and yeah it’s really really bad. And really really rare.)
I have seen news stories describe engine surges as “bursting into flames” before, but that’s not the case here.
The video of the incident shows a small but sustained flame emerging from the bottom-rear of the engine, well below the engine’s core.
There was an engine fire but in typical journalistic fashion it was far short of bursting into flames.
Unlikely to be boeing’s fault as they don’t make the engines, just the airframes.
Edit: An engine surge/compressor stall is the plane’s version of a backfire. Big bang and a burst of flames. Very exciting, but very little danger beyond the loss of thrust. This incident wasn’t a surge, but the last time I saw mainstream news say an engine “burst into flames” it was.
Was it just surging or like a compressor stall or something? FOD like a bird ingestion or something?
I mean, Boeing has/had quality problems, serious ethical failures, but also birds exist.
(I’m not good at explaining this, maybe should have found an explanation online somewhere instead.) You know those stages of a combustion engine - intake, compression, ignition, exhaust, all happening in sequence in an engine’s cylinders? Turbine engines do them too, but in a straight line and constantly. The front of the engine is obviously intake, but compressor fans do the compression just using fast and powerful fans, no seals or valves needed. Ignition lights everything up, exhaust can just flow out the back. (It flows over some more fan blades that steal some power from the expanding gases and use it to keep the whole thing spinning.)
Unless something goes wrong with the compressor fan blades, that is. If compression is too weak and the ignited air/fuel mixture can flow back out the front of the engine, that’s bad. And yeah, it happens sometimes, with any engine. Almost never with both at the same time. (Both engines failing at once low to the ground is like a once in a generation thing, and yeah it’s really really bad. And really really rare.)
Lotta people on the internet who would disagree with that one buddy
I’m sure an engine would have just as tough of a time with a spy drone as with a hypothetical flying animal XD
I have seen news stories describe engine surges as “bursting into flames” before, but that’s not the case here.
The video of the incident shows a small but sustained flame emerging from the bottom-rear of the engine, well below the engine’s core.
There was an engine fire but in typical journalistic fashion it was far short of bursting into flames.
Unlikely to be boeing’s fault as they don’t make the engines, just the airframes.
Edit: An engine surge/compressor stall is the plane’s version of a backfire. Big bang and a burst of flames. Very exciting, but very little danger beyond the loss of thrust. This incident wasn’t a surge, but the last time I saw mainstream news say an engine “burst into flames” it was.