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The damage on the ground is scary to look at. I think the only silver lining here is that it was "just" a sparser industrial area and there weren't any homes. I
by justsid 11mo ago
The damage on the ground is scary to look at. I think the only silver lining here is that it was "just" a sparser industrial area and there weren't any homes. I'm really curious about what the investigation will reveal in a few months. This doesn't look like a "regular" engine fire from a bird strike or so, you would normally expect the flames to come out the back and not over the wing. And at least in theory the MD-11 should be flyable with just two engines, although flames on a wing is probably "really really bad" just by itself already. Too early to speculate about what happened though.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Jtsummers 11mo ago> And at least in theory the MD-11 should be flyable with just two engines Flying with two engines and taking off without an engine in a loaded aircraft are two very different things. A lot more thrust is needed during takeoff than after.
- andy99 11mo agoI specifically remember watching a flight test doing an aggressive takeoff and having the voiceover say that aircraft (two engine) need to have enough power to take off full with one engine. And so can take off very steeply empty with two engines. Would that not also be the case for these planes?
- justsid 11mo agoYes, planes are designed to be able to take off with a lost engine. Usually this will extend the roll a bit because the speeds are different for engine out operations. This isn't the first MD-11 with an engine out take off, 5 years ago a FedEx MD-11 took off with a failure in the left engine[1]. Slightly different case, obviously, but it's certainly something that is accounted for when designing planes. [1] https://www.avherald.com/h?article=4dfd50b9&opt=0%20 https://www.avherald.com/h?article=4dfd50b9&opt=0%20
- bobthepanda 11mo agoThat being said, depending on how you lose the engine it can really mess up the takeoff; AA191 was lost when an engine detached from the plane on takeoff and took out part of the wing and hydraulic system with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191
- anonymars 11mo ago> when an engine detached from the plane on takeoff... https://imgur.com/a/NYlrLYO https://imgur.com/a/NYlrLYO https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/757091156717862935/1435446018098331648/Screenshot_2025-11-04_193907.png?ex=690bfec8&is=690aad48&hm=7a065142e6359edd8e41f00ed0bf70e18c1bdffef825d01ba209a16d893af4d7& https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/757091156717862935/14... Source: https://reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1ooms7t/ksdf_accident/nn5wrfh/ https://reddit.com/r/flying/comments/1ooms7t/ksdf_accident/n...
- rob74 11mo agoYes, the takeoff roll will be longer, the climb will be much more shallow, but it is possible to take off with one out of two engines (and obviously also with two out of three). Of course, after successful takeoff, the plane should turn around and land as soon as possible. In this case however, with the wing already on fire (the engine is below the wing, so flames coming out of it would be visible behind and under the wing, not in front), I'm afraid that even if they had managed to take off, the fuel tank would have exploded or burned through the wing before they would have had a chance to land. Actually, this looks similar to the 2000 Concorde crash...
- appreciatorBus 11mo agoAll planes are definitely capable of taking off safely even if they lose an engine at the worst time. Whatever happened here, I would be shocked if lack of thrust in the 2 remaining engines was a significant factor unless someone really screwed up the load calculations and they were overweight for conditions.
- dboreham 11mo agoLack of thrust in the "taken out by debris" sense seems to be the case here.
- lazide 11mo agoSingle engine planes (GA, and some military planes) don’t handle this condition well at all. In fact, for awhile (maybe still the case), the #1 killer of skydivers was single engine failure on takeoff from the jump plane (and similar aircraft failures), not accidents ‘while skydiving’.
- appreciatorBus 11mo agoyes true, I guess I was assuming we were talking about commercial airlines :)
- avalys 11mo agoEvery multi-engine airliner is designed to be able to take off safely even if an engine fails at a critical moment. What might have happened in this case is that the mechanism of failure of one engine caused damaged or interfered with the operation of another engine (via smoke, debris, etc.), and taking off with two engines degraded is not part of the design criteria.
- HPsquared 11mo agoSome engine failures can't be contained within the cowling, like turbine disc rupture. Probably something like this happened where fragments punctured the surrounding wing structure and/or fuel tanks.
- pixl97 11mo agoI do think 'engine fails' and 'engine has left the building' are two different categories of problems. Even if the rear engine was working I'm going to assume this craft would have crashed, probably just farther down range.
- filleduchaos 11mo agoTaking off with one engine inoperative (on a multi-engine aircraft, obviously - you aren't going to get anywhere with your only engine gone) is completely normal/within design parameters, albeit undesirable. In fact, it being normal almost certainly contributed to the scale of this accident, since a single engine failure during the takeoff roll isn't considered enough of an emergency to reject the takeoff at high speed (past a certain speed, you only abort if the aircraft is literally unflyable - for everything else, you take the aircraft & emergency into the air and figure it out there). The crew wouldn't have had any way to know that one of their engines had not simply failed, but was straight-up gone with their wing on fire to boot.
- Jtsummers 11mo ago> The crew wouldn't have had any way to know that one of their engines had not simply failed, but was straight-up gone with their wing on fire to boot. I don't know about the MD-11 itself, but other aircraft from that time period have sensors to detect and report overheat and fire in various parts of the aircraft, including engines and wings.
- appreciatorBus 11mo agoI’m sure they knew there was an issue, but I don’t think the sensors can differentiate between “your engine is on fire, but if you can shut it down quickly, everything will be cool.” and “half your entire wing is on fire and your engine is pouring flame out the front/top instead of the back”
- positron26 11mo agoThis puts an impractical amount of faith in the sensor wiring when the whole pylon and cowling are shredded.
- Jtsummers 11mo agoI don't know what the MD-11 would have had, again I didn't work on it. But the systems used for other aircraft would have reported an alarm based on what I saw in the video, at least they were designed to do that. The LRU receiving the sensor inputs wouldn't typically be in the wing and would be able to continue reporting the alarm condition even if the sensors fail. In fact, the lack of current from the sensor (for the systems I worked on) would have been enough to trigger the alarm if the sensor were completely eliminated.
- roygbiv2 11mo agoLooks like a compressor stall on number two engine two seconds into the video.
- appreciatorBus 11mo agoI don’t know, that looks like a lot more than just a stall. There was a ton of flame that looked like it was coming out of the front or top of the engine, rather than just something shooting out the back.
- loeg 11mo agoI think you're looking at the left wing (number 1) engine; GP is talking about either the tail or right wing engine. (I think tail is number 2 on MD-11.) There's a brief explosion visible through the smoke at about 1-2 seconds in, to the right of the engine visibly on fire; that's probably what he's talking about. Freeze frame: https://imgur.com/a/c3h8Qd3 https://imgur.com/a/c3h8Qd3
- FabHK 11mo agoAnd having 2 out of 3 engines fail (or underperform) would explain the insufficient climb thrust.
- loeg 11mo agoRight!
- appreciatorBus 11mo agoYup makes sense. Now seeing photos of the entire left engine on the ground by the runway and the implication that however it failed it might have damaged the tail engine.
- positron26 11mo agoAgree, looks like an engine disruption. The rotation already exacerbates the flow into that engine. Change in flow geometry gets more smoke in its way when it's already eating turbulent air. We don't know if it just had a disruption or a full-blown stall, but give the way it made it to takeoff speed and then just gave out, stall seems likely.
- JCM9 11mo agoZoning guidance generally prohibits land use near an airport that has a high density of people, precisely to limit casualties during an event like this. Industrial would be permitted while residential and commercial use is not. Scarily there are communities that have ignored such logic and permitted dense residential development right next to an airport.
- ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago> Zoning guidance generally prohibits land use near an airport that has a high density of people Queens, NY has entered the chat…
- globular-toast 11mo agoSome of the larger townships in Cape Town are right in the flight path too. Not many white people there either.
- chronciger 11mo ago>Queens, NY has entered the chat… You’re correct, but at least LaGuardia airport generally has takeoffs over water. LaGuardia aircraft landings may happen over dense apartment buildings, but less likely for catastrophic damage (glide path, less fuel, engines are <10% throttle, etc)
- ChrisMarshallNY 11mo agoIt also has JFK, on the South side.
- Thorrez 11mo agoProbably also due to noise.
- SilasX 11mo agoYeah I was going to say, that sounds like a much more salient reason not to live near an airport than the possibility of that rare crash.
- imglorp 11mo agoAn accident on takeoff means full tanks - some 38000 gallons(?) spread along the site like a napalm strike.
- wlesieutre 11mo agoA particularly large amount of fuel because it was flying to Honolulu
- WorldMaker 11mo agoA particularly large amount of fuel also because it was loaded with heavy cargo intended to make it all the way to Honolulu.
- alchemism 11mo agoThe ground damage in the recent North Philadelphia Airport crash was only due to a chartered jet, but it practically wiped out a residential city block.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]