Engine breaks up on LAX-bound A380 , forcing emergency landing in Canada

[Tanuki]

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/01/engine-breaks-up-on-air-france-a380-forcing-emergency-landing-in-canada

"Agence France-Presse

Saturday 30 September 2017 20.23 EDTLast modified on Saturday 30 September 201720.57 EDT

An Air France A380 superjumbo jetliner taking more than 500 people from Paris to Los Angeles made an emergency landing in Canada on Saturday following “serious damage” to one of its four engines, the airline said.

“Flight 066 landed without further damage at the Goose Bay military airport in Canada and all of the 520 people on board were evacuated with no injuries,” an Air France spokesman in Paris said.

The Airbus double-decker, wide body aircraft was rerouted as it passed over Greenland, landing in Goose Bay in eastern Canada, the spokesman said.

The landing went off with no problems for the jetliner carrying 496 passengers and 24 crew members, the spokesman said. The airline was exploring options to get the passengers to the US.

.......

Video and photo images posted on social media, apparently by passengers or their relatives, showed extensive damage to the front of the outer starboard engine, with part of its external cowling stripped away.

......

Air France operates 10 Airbus A380s, which are the largest passenger planes in the world.

Their version of the craft uses GP7200 engines, a giant turbofan built by General Electric and Pratt and Whitney of the US.

Goose Bay is a base operated by the Royal Canadian Air Force but is also a designated standby airport for diverted transatlantic flights."...

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. I'd be very surprised if that kind of damage was caused by a bird strike.

An engine that large could ingest just about anything smaller than a pterodactyl without the entire front cowling being torn off. And if this happened over the north Atlantic near Greenland they'd have been at 36,000 feet or so, and you won't find birds up there; they can't breathe any better than we can at that altitude. Looks more like some kind of structural failure.

[applegrove]

2. Scary eh? Hopefully this investigation will save even more lives.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. Not all that scary. An A-380 has four engines and can fly quite well on three

or even two, if necessary. Unless an uncontained engine failure caused shrapnel to penetrate something important, like fuel or hydraulic lines, the airplane could keep on flying without much trouble. However, airline regulations (and in the U.S., FAA regulations) require landing at the nearest suitable airport to be sure nothing like that had happened, and also because the airplane would use too much fuel for its trip if it kept going. That doesn't sound logical because one less engine would be using less fuel, but the problem is that if engine thrust is asymmetric due to an engine failure (especially of an outboard engine), the airplane yaws (flies a bit sideways), creating a lot of drag that results in excessive fuel burn.

[applegrove]

4. Good to know.

[Strelnikov_]

5. Another example of the impressive job the FAA and the EASA . . along with the aircraft co's

have done over the last few decades, true engineering marvels.

Wonder how this would have played out under a GOPTrump "free market" system.