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United 777-200 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure
- orange_joe 10mo ago[flagged]
- fluidcruft 10mo agoClearly you didn't read the article.
- rick_dalton 10mo agoRemind me what company is responsible for making the 777-200 engines (hint: it’s not Boeing)
- ceejayoz 10mo agoEngine problems are hardly the only Boeing issue in recent years. Nor am I inclined to give them a pass on those; they are most certainly heavily involved in the engine design and production process, as they are on most outsourced parts they use.
- tekla 10mo agoHow does Boeing being involved in engine design involve an aging airframe on a major Carrier?
- ceejayoz 10mo ago"The federal government should take this company into receivership" is clearly speaking to more than one single incident.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoThe 777 was fitted with at least three different engines, from General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, or Rolls-Royce. Customer airline normally selects which engine they prefer. Some of these same engines are used on competing aircraft from Airbus.
- rick_dalton 10mo agoThe 777-200 is a 1994 design, way before all the recent trouble started. Its three engine types have been produced thousands of times, the GE90 has an excellent in flight shutdown rate of one per million flight hours for example.
- avazhi 10mo agoI agree with you, but not because of this particular incident. This was a Pratt and Whitney issue most likely, but that doesn’t mean Boeing isn’t mega fucked for other reasons.
- schmuckonwheels 10mo agoClickbait. The B777 is probably the safest, most meticulously engineered commercial wide-body aircraft ever built. They're also getting old, and airlines retire old aircraft.
- carbocation 10mo agoThe article explicitly says that the aircraft is safe. I don't think this is particularly clickbait-y.
- schmuckonwheels 10mo agoOne sentence buried in an article that ledes with BIG SCARY ENGINE FAILURE.
- kccqzy 10mo agoIt’s not a buried sentence. It’s a section heading in large font saying “ The 777-200 Problem Is Not Safety. It Is Economics.” Then there’s a whole paragraph stating “The Boeing 777-200 is not an unsafe airplane. As far as I can tell, that is not the issue even after the incident over Dulles over the weekend.” Then just in case the reader jumped to conclusions, the first sentence of the conclusion again says it’s safe.
- cvoss 10mo agoYou are explaining exactly why the headline is clickbait: The article does not support the conclusions implied by the headline. > just in case the reader jumped to conclusions The author is correcting a problem of his own creation. He has already misled the reader with his headline. He means for the reader to misunderstand... and click.
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- d_silin 10mo agoNew Boeing 777-X is coming soon. United can order them if they feel inclined to do so.
- justapassenger 10mo agoI wouldn't hold my breath for it. It was suppose to be released in 2020. It's end of 2025 and current release date is 2027 (and who knows if it'll be pushed back again).
- miki123211 10mo agoTo a European like me, United was such a weird airline to fly. There were actual commercials played before the safety video, the cabin crew warned passengers to make sure children cannot see the adult content they're watching (can you get more American than that?), and their credit card was offered multiple times during the flight. At least the WiFi was reasonably cheap. Over here, that stuff would never fly (no pun intended), except maybe on Ryanair or other extremely low-cost carriers. On e.g. a Lufthansa longhaul flight, which are priced similarly and cover the same route I flew (fra-ord), it would be unthinkable.
- schmuckonwheels 10mo ago>the cabin crew warned passengers to make sure children cannot see the adult content they're watching (can you get more American than that?) Is it considered normal in Europe to watch pornography on public transit in public so children can see it? >Lufthansa longhaul flight My experience is different. Old planes, and Lufthansa cabin crew are cold and service was poor and inattentive.
- whoknowsidont 10mo agoHow is that your interpretation of OP's statement?
- zwnow 10mo agoIts normal in Europe to not watch any kind of pornography in public. Idk why you would do that.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- schmuckonwheels 10mo agoI remember the days when movies shown on aircraft were edited for both content and dialogue. These days, with so much content expected to be available at your fingertips, both in your seat and people bringing iPads on board loaded with R-rated streams, it's expected to be mindful of your neighbor on such things. How that is distinctly "American" I don't quite understand.
- lfshammu 10mo agowow the blogosphere really is just ai slop now
- slg 10mo agoI'm very hesitant to make those sorts of accusations, but the writing has multiple hallmarks of LLMs and this is one of three articles posted today by the same author to that blog before noon their local time. I guess this is just what the internet is now, constantly wondering whether you're reading actual thoughts of another human being or whether it is just LLM output generated to stick between ads.
- dawnerd 10mo agoWhat gave it away for me was the Conclusion heading. LLMs love adding those in and its just unnatural for news/blog posts. Reading back over it, everything about it just seems very machine written.
- Digory 10mo ago"...777 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure ... and also before Dulles engine failure, for reasons having nothing to do with the Dulles engine failure." To be fair, I read all of it, and both sides of the question interest me. But the engine failure and the economics of the 777 are totally different things.
- coredog64 10mo agoThe article's TL;DR is that the economics of 30-year old P&W4090 engines make these airframes even less useful to United.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- zymhan 10mo agoWhy are they totally different? For such an old airframe, the only significant costs are fuel and maintenance. A revamp to the maintenance schedule that requires more frequent engine overhauls absolutely makes the economics of operating 777-200s even less appealing.
- 4fterd4rk 10mo agoHow the hell is this AI slop getting upvoted? The early 777s are being retired because they're old. Engine failures are a thing that happens on all planes. You aren't going to retire planes because of one unless it reveals a greater issue, which this incident did not.
- zamadatix 10mo agoBeing irrationally interested in the risks air travel has been a perennial news focus for folks since long before news was written by AI. Especially if it involves Boeing planes. On the flipside, what they are looking at replacing the fleet with is an interesting follow-up if you regularly fly United.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoAll 777-200 are less than 30 years old (June 1995 first commercial deployment according to Wikipedia). Considering we are still flying older aircraft such as MD (but as a cargo plane), can United find a buyer for this fleet?
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoAnd..it is the engine, Boeing doesn't even make those, so I'm confused why this is a fuselage problem? Or is it because the older air frames might not justify engine replacements? (after RTA, it seems that is the case, and the engine it was certified to work with is old also).
- buildsjets 10mo agoFirst, the engine itself is certified under 14 CFR Part 33, but the engine cowling is certified under 14 CFR Part 25, which makes it an airframe part, not an engine part. Boeing (Spirit division) does make the engine cowling for the 777-200, which is what separated from the aircraft and caused the fire on the ground. Even in the case of a catastrophic failure of the engine, the cowling and all of it's parts are required by regulation to remain attached to the aircraft. There was a previous incident a few years ago also on a Pratt-powered 777-200 where an engine failure cascaded into a much more serious cowling failure. Here's an article on that previous incident. I'm unable to find a source on whether the design changes discussed were ever implemented. https://simpleflying.com/boeing-777-engine-cover-change/ https://simpleflying.com/boeing-777-engine-cover-change/ The FAA in the past several years has had a particular focus on engine cowling components departing the aircraft and causing secondary damage, the most critical example being the 737 fan cowling that separated from the engine, impacted the fuselage, broke a window, and caused a passenger to be sucked out and killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380 https://www.regulations.gov/document/FAA-2023-2234-0001 https://www.regulations.gov/document/FAA-2023-2234-0001
- ralph84 10mo agoThere isn't a cargo conversion available for the 777-200 or 777-200ER. But at the right price they could probably find some buyers in the VIP and charter markets.
- kotaKat 10mo agoFrom ~April 2019 to this event was nearly 6 years of flawless performance from UA’s GE90 engine fleet, but the P&W ones tend to have a few problems a year. Being this is the first time a GE90 popped on a 777-200 in a while? Eh, the future’s gonna keep flying ‘em.
- sheldonth 10mo agoWith the increasing frequency of civil aviation issues, one can't help but wonder what the future of air travel looks like. It may not be as business-as-usual as many today anticipate.
- cvoss 10mo agoAny headline which reads "X after Y" is clickbait. Such a headline is constructed to imply that Y caused or led to or is in some way related to X. But then you read the article and find no connection at all. In this case the article confesses (rather late): > The Boeing 777-200 is not an unsafe airplane. As far as I can tell, that is not the issue even after the incident over Dulles over the weekend. X after Y headlines are always technically correct. Sure, X is presently true. And remember scary/salacious/enraging thing Y that happened recently? So X is after Y. Click me.