Not just snow falling out of the sky in Colorado

[lizkat]

A Boeing 777-200 experienced catastrophic failure of its right engine above Denver, Colorado enroute to Hawaii. Debris fell to the ground, some of it in large pieces, and insulation ash was also observed descending, but no one was injured and the plane was able to land safely. Needless to say FAA and NTSB will be looking into the incident. Various photos were posted on Twitter, one of them appearing to show a broken fan blade in the engine.

'I thought we were done': Debris falls from plane near Denver

Debris from a United Airlines plane fell onto Denver suburbs during an emergency landing Saturday, with one very large piece that appears to be part of the engine narrowly missing a home. No injuries were reported.

www.latimes.com

Video posted on Twitter showed the engine engulfed in flames as the plane flew. Freeze frames from different video taken by a passenger sitting slightly in front of the engine and posted on Twitter appeared to show a broken fan blade in the engine.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Authorities have not released any details about what may have caused the failure.

Based on initial photos and videos posted by passengers, aviation safety experts said the plane appeared to have suffered an uncontained and catastrophic engine failure. Such an event is extremely rare and happens when huge spinning discs inside the engine suffer some sort of failure and breach the armored casing around the engine that is designed to contain the damage, said John Cox, an aviation safety expert and retired airline pilot who runs an aviation safety consulting firm called Safety Operating Systems.

“That unbalanced disk has a lot of force in it, and it’s spinning at several thousand rotations per minute ... and when you have that much centrifugal force, it has to go somewhere,” he said in a phone interview.

Former National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Jim Hall called the incident another example of “cracks in our culture in aviation safety [that] need to be addressed.”

Hall, who was on the board from 1994 to 2001, has criticized the FAA over the last decade as “drifting toward letting the manufacturers provide the aviation oversight that the public was paying for.” That goes especially for Boeing, he said.

 

[Thomas Veil]

If it wasn’t so scary, it’d almost be funny: “Well, the plane landed...in Denver...and Englewood...and Littleton...and Brookfield...”

Thank god the plane got back all right. That centrifugal force must be terrible. Think of an unevenly distributed load in a top-load washing machine banging around...x10,000.

It sure sounds like something was missed in a safety check...something like metal fatigue or stress fractures.

 

[lizkat]

If it wasn’t so scary, it’d almost be funny: “Well, the plane landed...in Denver...and Englewood...and Littleton...and Brookfield...”

Thank god the plane got back all right. That centrifugal force must be terrible. Think of an unevenly distributed load in a top-load washing machine banging around...x10,000.

It sure sounds like something was missed in a safety check...something like metal fatigue or stress fractures.

Yah when something like that happened to another plane awhile back, part of the failed engine broke a passenger window and killed a woman; it was only through other passengers hauling her back into the cabin that her body was prevented from being sucked out of the plane by the sudden pressure differential. The cage around the turbine is meant to prevent that sort of escape of parts of a failed engine but it's not guaranteed. This one it looks like the rivets on the rim of the cowling held ok but the framing it was attached to was just completely ripped away by the explosion and that whole rim landed feet from a home and the guy's truck. Talk about luck of the draw, you couldn't park something there deliberately without practice using even the best available weaponry management features...

 

[Alli]

Reminds me of that wonderful tv show “Dead Like Me.” The female lead was killed by a toilet that fell out of an airplane.

 

[shadow puppet]

Video taken by a passenger on the flight. Pretty wild.

https://www.Twitter or X not allowed/i/web/status/1363253631626080256/

 

[Thomas Veil]

Reminds me of that wonderful tv show “Dead Like Me.” The female lead was killed by a toilet that fell out of an airplane.

That was a fun show.

Video taken by a passenger on the flight. Pretty wild.

https://www.Twitter or X not allowed/i/web/status/1363253631626080256/

Yeah, when your engine's on fire and it's shaking like a Texan sitting in the dark in 20º weather, you've got problems.

 

[Yoused]

Reminds me of that wonderful tv show “Dead Like Me.” The female lead was killed by a toilet that fell out of an airplane.

I recall an incident that happened a couple miles from where I used to live, in which a family found a large chunk of stinky ice in the living room, beneath a hole in the roof. Presumably it had accumulated on the hull of an airliner, near the drain, and came loose as the plane descended into warmer air and was approaching the airport not far from their home.

 

[SuperMatt]

Reminds me of that wonderful tv show “Dead Like Me.” The female lead was killed by a toilet that fell out of an airplane.

One of the episodes of Weeds the concessions cart fell out of a plane onto somebody’s house…

 

[shadow puppet]

Most that's fallen out of the sky near my 'hood was Harrison Ford.

 

[Thomas Veil]

I recall an incident that happened a couple miles from where I used to live, in which a family found a large chunk of stinky ice in the living room, beneath a hole in the roof.

Hence the expression, “That stinks on ice.”