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‘It just blew fire’: Kauai woman watched as an engine fell apart on flight 328
- cointreau 6y agoI saw a video someone took out the window of the flaming engine. It was unsettlingly quiet; no one talking or screaming, just the background plane noise. I cannot imagine seeing an engine on fire outside your window and being that calm. Just incredible.
- sschueller 6y agoThat's most likely because the plane itself was flying stable and the pilot informed the passengers well. It not having a direct impact on the perceived flight characteristics in the passenger compartment removes it from you in a way. I've been on turbulent fligts before where people where screeming but the plane was perfectly fine.
- dehrmann 6y agoI went on a ride in a jet trainer. The most relevant safety instructions I got were "the only time we bail is if there's an engine fire I can't put out. If I can put it out, we'll glide to an airstrip--this plane is an excellent glider." I have no idea how people who haven't been briefed on engine fires would deal with one.
- ubersync 6y agoHow does the gender of the person who watched/recorded this matter so much that the author had to put it in the title?
- midasuni 6y agoWould you write “person” instead?
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago> 'It just blew fire': A passenger watched as an engine fell apart on flight 328
- ubersync 6y agoHow about "a passenger"?
- romski 6y agoHow does the island residency of the person matter so much either.
- young_unixer 6y agoHow does the flight number matter so much either.
- dehrmann 6y agoLocal news always reports this.
- evgen 6y agoI am surprised they did not manage to put her age in the headline, hometown, gender, and age seem to be the common ID for small newspapers.
- stefan_ 6y agoIt's HawaiiNewsNow and they are having a fucking interview with her. What's wrong with you people? The title is her introduction!
- cjbenedikt 6y agoAgreed, the discussions on HN are getting ever more ridiculous.
- dehrmann 6y agoI guess it doesn't, but it is useful for English pronouns later on. I'm curios what's idiomatic in languages without gendered pronouns. It'd be different if it called out her race. Also, "Florida man" is a meme.
- ysavir 6y agoIt doesn't matter to the content, but generally speaking, adding specificity to a story makes it sound more real and immediate to a general audience.
- true_religion 6y agoTitles are kind of about enticing readers while explicitly not giving away information that matters a lot. So in this case the island name, gender, and flight number are all just part of the tease.
- dang 6y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- yuppie_scum 6y agoRelax, francis
- rsynnott 6y ago“[Place] [man|woman]” is a pretty standard, bordering on cliche, method of writing a headline.
- dang 6y agoRecent and related: United B772 at Denver on Feb 20th 2021, engine inlet separates from engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208555 - Feb 2021 (462 comments)
- xwdv 6y agoMeh, a plane can fly with one engine, and glide with none. I wouldn’t be too worried, unless it blew up and took out a wing. And even if they were flying over the pacific, planes are required to be within a certain distance of land at all times. Probably enough to get to an airport. Edit: I don’t get the downvotes. It’s true.
- blunte 6y agoThe downvotes begin from “meh”. Many of these people reasonably thought they would die. What you so casually dismiss could have been a tragic story if only one more failure had occurred.
- xwdv 6y agoNot reasonably, no. And many passengers on the flight casually dismissed it as well from what the article says. Also, sometimes engines fail silently and passengers don’t even realize it since air keeps blowing through it to keep it spinning. You likely have been on a plane with a downed engine and didn’t even realize it if you fly regularly. You were fine.
- KMag 6y agoThe passengers would be unaware only if the engine failure occurred near the destination. Pilots don't just keep flying for hours with an engine failure if they have any alternative places to land.
- adamjb 6y agoFunnily enough I was searching about for info on B772 single engine range and found this anecdote that contradicts you. >Just as a practical example of reduced range with an engine out, We departed Santiago, Chile in a 747 freighter with enough fuel to reach Miami. During the climb out we lost an engine. We elected to continue rather than dump fuel and return. However, because we could not reach our intended cruising altitude, the increased fuel burn meant we only had enough fuel to reach Panama City, Panama https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/7437/how-far-can-a-777-fly-with-just-one-engine-at-altitude https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/7437/how-far-ca...
- izgzhen 6y agoI definitely can't be calm and shooting video like this. For me, a plane flight is a totally magical blackbox, in which I just get onboard, sit, lay back, and done. Maybe I should be more informed.
- WalterBright 6y agoI'm the opposite. I was always a nervous flyer until I joined Boeing designing flight critical systems. Knowing how the airplanes are engineered gave me a lot of confidence in flying.
- bstar77 6y agoAll the engineering in the world isn’t going to save you if the pilot is as incompetent as the one in the Buffalo crash was.
- WalterBright 6y agoEngineers can make all the parts safe except for the nut behind the wheel. (Having a copilot helps.)
- newsclues 6y agoAs of yet the human is the problem engineers are currently working to remove from the equation
- tomjakubowski 6y agoI hope what they want is to reduce the likelihood of human error causing catastrophic failure. Not necessarily to take humans out of the loop altogether.
- zamfi 6y agoThe former may require the latter.
- haecceity 6y agoI'm glad everyone is safe. Boeing is a deeply troubled company and FAA needs to be restructured.
- mulmen 6y agoThere is no reason to believe Boeing or the FAA are at fault here. The plane performed as designed and was able to safely return to the airport with no injuries. Boeing's design and construction did what it was supposed to do, FAA procedures were followed, everyone walked away safely.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- topspin 6y agoThere have been three significant airliner engine failures in 72 hours. All aircraft survived. All are Boeing; 777 (Denver), 747 (Maastricht) and 737 (Makassar.) That's a lot of engine failures. It's hard to find a common mode here, other than they're Boeing, which is next to meaningless; the engines and airframes are all very different. Still, it's hard to overcome instinct. "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." (It's a quote from Ian Fleming; I'm not suggesting any sort of 'attack,' only that some common mode phenomenon could be in play) We get 4 or 5 and we're going to have to look at this really hard. If I had a gun to my head when asked what is going on I would speculate that perhaps these engines need more scrutiny before returning to service after a long COVID-19 hiatus. But then I don't actually know if that was even the case for any or all of the engines involved.
- Pasorrijer 6y agoHit the nail on the head here. The bigger problem isn't that there was an engine failure or even a blade off failure. The problem is that the containment failed. An engine is designed to lose a blade, have the cowling and engine frame contain the damage and land safely. When that containment fails, the damage and potential for catastrophe increases exponentially.[Edit - Spelling]
- throwaway6734 6y agoI found this video shocking at first and then incredibly reassuring. Stable flight with an engine on fire really hit home how well designed these planes are
- FredFS456 6y agoRegulations require that two-engine planes (twinjets) be able to fly level with one engine out.
- alamortsubite 6y agoMy mom was a flight attendant. She and my dad used to take my brother and I on a lot of trips. Once, when I was young, we got on a flight to Germany out of JFK (TWA). Almost immediately after takeoff (presumably from a bird strike), an engine caught on fire. A few things I'll never forget: 1) since it was a night flight and the cabin lights were off, the inside of the plane was lit up so intensely by the flames it would have made the creators of a disaster movie envious, 2) many adults around me were screaming, 3) my mom leaned over and said to me in a voice no less calm than if she were telling me what she packed for my school lunch, "Don't worry, the captain will shut off fuel to that engine and turn around and land. But we'll have to go someplace else for our trip." I instantly went from being terrified to totally relaxed, and the next day we went to Disney World. Respect airline crews.
- discordance 6y agoArthur C. Clarke said Douglas Adams' use of "don't panic" was perhaps the best advice that could be given to humanity. [0] 0: https://web.archive.org/web/20080723051103/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw19051.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080723051103/http://www.scifi....
- soheil 6y agoPanicking got us to escape lions and survive the evolutionary uphill, I wouldn't so hastily get rid of just yet.
- zamfi 6y agoPanic is great if you need to run or fight. Neither is much use on a plane with an engine on fire.
- benburleson 6y agoAdrenaline can definitely be useful. Losing your wits under stress? Almost definitely not useful.
- 6y ago
- amelius 6y ago> The O-ring she described landed in the yard of a Broomfield residence That wasn't an O-ring, but metal cladding of the engine.
- sneak 6y agoIt was a metal, o-shaped ring. For everyone who isn't an engineer or didn't live through the minutiae of Challenger, "o ring" is a fine description.
- aikinai 6y agoO-rings aren't just for engineers. It's a standard part use in many everyday scenarios, not just rockets. You can buy them in the hardware store. The cladding is most certainly not an o-ring, even to the layman. Rather, the writer probably used the word o-ring specifically because of association with the Challenger disaster. They probably remember (maybe subconsciously) a lot of discussion of o-rings in a disaster back in the day so that word popped into mind when describing a part related to this disaster.
- hibbelig 6y agoAll rings I've seen were o-shaped. So I think there is no need to add that aspect.
- fsckboy 6y agothe "o" in o-ring refers to the cross section of the ring if you slice through it
- soheil 6y agoIt's a round piece of metal in the shape of an O... hence o-ring, makes sense? Assuming she should know mechanical engineering is bizarre.
- aikinai 6y agoIt wasn't the lady on the flight calling it an o-ring, it was the writer. And there's no way you'd just happen to make up the word "o-ring" unless you were trying to reference an existing term. You'd just call it a "ring" as the lady on the flight did.
- mark-r 6y agoYou can tell that the pictures of the debris were taken by drones. The area around them has been taped off with police tape, I'm sure photographers aren't allowed close enough to get good pictures.
- soheil 6y agoThe engine seems to be on fire without the fire ever going out, why is that? Is there still residual fuel in the pipes after the fuel is shut off or is it oil, etc?
- ooboe 6y agoThat fire through the thrust reversers burned all the way to the ground. It was probably lubrication oil, hydraulic oil, or CFRP burning.
- soheil 6y agoI don't understand why everyone is so calm either, if the engine is on fire there is no guarantee that it won't blow up or worse take out a big piece of the wing, etc. and causing a crash. There are passengers who cause total mayhem even when the plane is not moving [0] [0] https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/asia/united-passenger-dragged-off-china-reaction/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/asia/united-passenger-dragged...
- ambicapter 6y agoIn either of those cases, not being calm is of no benefit either.
- bagels 6y agoTypically at that point the fuel is cut to the engine, it's pretty unlikely to "blow up"
- webmaven 6y agoA few years ago, I was on a transatlantic flight about to depart from the east coast (accelerating down the runway) when there was a loud bang and the plane skidded to a stop. One of the engines somehow managed to shred itself to pieces and fall off the wing onto the tarmac. The bang was apparently shrapnel and scrap metal hitting the fuselage rather than an actual explosion. As we hadn't actually taken off yet there wasn't all that much drama, but boy it was a long wait until we finally got off the plane and could use the overnight lodging vouchers the airline provided.
- jve 6y agoIn other news, 7 dead after engine failure. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/21/africa/nigeria-miliary-plane-crash-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/21/africa/nigeria-miliary-pl...
- kioleanu 6y agoThe only thing that makes this news article relevant was that they were both planes. Of course having your only engine fail would make your plane crash. Having one of your two engines fail is, as we see, relatively unproblematic to your life expectancy
- account42 6y ago> Of course having your only engine fail would make your plane crash. That is not a given at all - many planes, especially commercial airlines, will still be able to glide with no engines operational.