5 ms·

Wow is this really how the industry views it? The notion of having one "less fixed" engine on a twin engine commercial jet aircraft is ok, so long as the other

Wow is this really how the industry views it? The notion of having one "less fixed" engine on a twin engine commercial jet aircraft is ok, so long as the other engine is the more fixed version? Sounds incredibly risky. For such a critical component, I figured they would adopt the military position: "2 is one... one is none".

deleted 7y ago
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t0mas88 7y ago
Not as crazy as you think. We train every 6 months for all types of engine failures. And the plane is required to be able to sustain an engine failure at any point of the flight and still make it safely to an airport with quite a bit of margin, otherwise the flight wouldn't go. So having one "less safe" engine still means everything is much much safer than the drive to the airport.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > So having one "less safe" engine still means everything is much much safer than the drive to the airport. That's a statement that I'd be happy to see the numerical support for. To hold the number of fatalities of people driving to the airport in total needs to exceed the number of fatalities as a result of airplanes crashing after one engine already failed on a relative scale, related to the number of people on board those aircraft that had one engine fail. Keep in mind that the chances for messing stuff up increase once one engine is out simply because all your eggs are in a single basket. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/02/transasia-crash-pilot-pulled-wrong-throttle-shut-down-sole-engine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/02/transasia-cras... This puts the counter at 43 against. I'm sure that we can dig up other examples. I think one engine out is a sufficient change of the underlying stats that the per-passenger mile quote might no longer be valid. Of course the other input required is how many planes have single engine failures.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

t0mas88 7y ago

Not as crazy as you think. We train every 6 months for all types of engine failures. And the plane is required to be able to sustain an engine failure at any point of the flight and still make it safely to an airport with quite a bit of margin, otherwise the flight wouldn't go. So having one "less safe" engine still means everything is much much safer than the drive to the airport.

jacquesm 7y ago
> So having one "less safe" engine still means everything is much much safer than the drive to the airport. That's a statement that I'd be happy to see the numerical support for. To hold the number of fatalities of people driving to the airport in total needs to exceed the number of fatalities as a result of airplanes crashing after one engine already failed on a relative scale, related to the number of people on board those aircraft that had one engine fail. Keep in mind that the chances for messing stuff up increase once one engine is out simply because all your eggs are in a single basket. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/02/transasia-crash-pilot-pulled-wrong-throttle-shut-down-sole-engine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/02/transasia-cras... This puts the counter at 43 against. I'm sure that we can dig up other examples. I think one engine out is a sufficient change of the underlying stats that the per-passenger mile quote might no longer be valid. Of course the other input required is how many planes have single engine failures.