I’ve received a number of emails from folks who saw these pictures of what is ostensibly an Air China jumbo jet with a very badly FOD’d (foreign object damage) engine.
Many of the emails allege that the jet was inspected in a western country where the damage was first noticed, imputing a rather lackadaisical standard of air safety on the part of China’s national carrier.
A pilot for a Chinese carrier requested permission and landed at FRA (Frankfurt, Germany) for an unscheduled refueling stop. The reason became soon apparent to the ground crew: The
Number 3 engine had been shut down because of excessive vibration, and because it didn’t look so good. It had apparently been no problem for the tough guys back in China: they took some sturdy straps and wrapped them around several of the fan blades and the structures behind, thus stopping any unwanted windmilling (engine spinning by itself due to airflow passing thru the blades during flight) and associated uncomfortable vibration caused by the suboptimal fan.Note that the straps are seatbelts….how resourceful!
After making the “repairs”, off they went into the wild blue yonder with another revenue-making flight on only three engines! With the increased fuel consumption, they got a bit low on fuel, and just set it down at the closest airport for a quick refill. That’s when the problems started: The Germans, who are kind of picky about this stuff, inspected the malfunctioning engine and immediately grounded the aircraft.
(Besides the seatbelts, notice the appalling condition of the fan blades.)
The airline operator had to send money to get the first engine replaced (it took about
10 days). The repair contractor decided to do some impromptu inspection work on the other engines, none of which looked all that great either.The result: a total of 3 engines were eventually changed on this plane before it was permitted to fly again.
Now, I certainly can’t speak for the narrative above – and Snopes.com calls its provenance “undetermined” – but it’s almost certain that the jet pictured is in Air China livery. And those seem to be packing straps rather than seat belts, which doesn’t answer the question of whether the engine was secured for flight with the straps to prevent vibration (unlikely), the straps were the source of the FOD (unlikely) or whether they were placed in the damaged engine to secure it for shipping (what’s left over).
What is true is that I’ve never seen an engine so comprehensively damaged at the first stage. Most FODs that I’ve seen involve a hard object damaging the first stage blades only slightly, chipping off pieces that cause cascading damage to the fan and and compressor blades aft of that one. I’ve seen engines so badly damaged at the back end that you could see daylight through the low pressure turbine that had only a very tiny, single hit up front.
My guess is that whatever it was went through that engine, there was a lot of it, there was no mistake in the crew’s mind that they had hit it and very little likelihood that anyone could take one look at that engine and decide to fly to Europe on it.
But that’s just guessing.
If those are the only pictures to the story i don´t think it´s possible to say the engine belonged to the aircraft in them, the engine is on a trolley not on the wing.
That’s been around!
I think that is the front end of a hi-bypass not ducted, TF, ain’t it? Most times fod’ll go through the fan and out into the airstream and not down into compressor section. Agree Lex damage like that came from something big and hard. As far as operating with those straps in place, agree…it’d never get around the horn without coming apart…
Concur w/analysis. Just someone disparaging Air China and China in particular..(although I wouldn’t want my dog to eat food from the PRC)
b2
I recently received the same email and promptly went off to Snopes to see what they had to say. I’ve been prowling around and I haven’t been able to find out anything that sheds light on the picture.
One thing sprang to mind as I was looking at the picture: While the aircraft in the background is certainly in CAAC livery, I can’t see anything that necessarily connects the engine specifically to that airframe or airline. I can’t make out any markings that would definitely point to CAAC as the engine operator. There is another wing directly above the engine but it appears to be an Airbus of some type. Could be an A320 class – which doesn’t use that engine – or an A300/A310, which if I recall does use the same type of engine.
Last, the engine is secured correctly for a three engine ferry if it’s off a 47. Of course, no passengers should be along on one of those types of flights.
Last, the engine is secured correctly for a three engine ferry if it’s off a 47. Of course, no passengers should be along on one of those types of flights
Didn’t deter BA from scrounging up some otherwise lost revenue…
BA initially claimed that the engine had failed an hour into the flight. But the airline admitted yesterday that the problem had occurred a few seconds after take-off when the Boeing 747 was only 100ft above the ground.
Air traffic controllers at Los Angeles spotted streams of sparks shooting from the engine and immediately radioed the pilot. He attempted to throttle the engine back but was forced to shut it down after it continued to overheat. The plane then began circling over the Pacific while the pilot contacted BA’s control centre in London to discuss what to do. They decided the flight should continue to London even though it would burn more fuel on just three engines.
Due to farting around the vcty of LAX deciding what to and the extra burn due to the higher required thrust on the remaining 3 engines, the passengers still got disappointed …
The British Airways flight 268 from Los Angeles was diverted to Manchester from Heathrow because the pilot feared he did not have enough fuel
Yep, remember that one… I’ve had typed pilots tell me either 1) perfectly safe, they’d have done the same or 2)worst decision ever, never would’ve done it, etc.
Turns out that they would have made it into London anyway based on how much was in the tanks at Manchester but they opted to take a more conservative route.
I think the difference is that the original email alleges that the CAAC crew started the take off roll with the engine inop.
Operating a flight outside the M.E.L may mean you end up on a test flight gone bad…
I have seen a couple of catastrophic failures of marine gas turbine engines that usually resulted in the same type of cascading failure as Lex has mentioned. The first row of stators sustains some damage that breaks off a piece of the blading which in turn causes more and more damage as it tumbles through the engine. The further you go through the compressor section of the engine the smaller and smaller the blades become and the risk of FODing them out become greater.
The difference between the jet engine that Lex is familiar with and the MGTE that I am familiar with the the fact that both of those are jet engines where almost all the air going in the front goes over all the blades and out the back.(a straight axial flow turbine) In this case you are talking about a jet fan engine where most of the air never goes over the compressor fan but rather passes around and outboard of it. I think this might be the reason for engine being able to still run with significant damage to the first stage.
I dunno what might have been able to cause that type of damage – perhaps hailstones but I think that it is probably possible for an engine of that type to sustain that kind of damage without FODing the rest of the engine.
Just my thoughts. I’ve been wrong before….
Now that I went back it looks like Badbob might have already answered the question. Sorry Badbob and Lex.
Captain,
That photo and others circulated at the East Hartford airplane motor factory a few years ago. Word filtered down from the service department types that it was real.
As I have always said, if the plane looks that bad, take the train.
bc
While the main body certainly looks to use the livery of Air China, the engine cowling does not seem to match. Looking around the net I see that when Air China used parallel stripes on the body the engines were grey. The engine cowling is only blue on the newer livery.
Is it possible that these fan-blades were damaged during some on-ground testing rather than in-flight? Either way this looks more like damage that would be the result of the engine running into a stationary object on the ground, given that most of the damage is around the same circular distance from the center.