The engines on an Airbus A321 are low to the ground.
Just how does a person manage to elevate themselves so as to be ingested in engine?
🎶 Might as well jump! 🎶
I don’t think you have to get terribly close in order to get sucked off the ground and ingested. I’ve seen films.
“how does a person manage to elevate themselves so as to be ingested in engine?”
Its really not a matter of elevation.
Given the immense suction of a turbine engine, it wouldn’t be difficult at all.
Foreign objects ingested into jet engines has plagued aviation since the first jet engine flew.
The article says it was an Airbus A-321. If you were to walk up to one of the engines, the lower lip of the inlet cowl would be about waist high. If the engine was at idle, it would pull you in.
Actually, I think it’s pretty easy.
The same way dust elevates itself into a vacuum cleaner.
The engines on an Airbus A321 are low to the ground.
It’s like the mouth of a bass once the fan blades are spun up. It sucks in the air in front of it, creating a vacuum, with enough force to lift things off the ground and into the engine’s intake.
There’s a video out there of a jet preparing to be catapulted off a carrier deck. It’s on the verge of being launch when a deck hand gets ingested into one of the intakes. Some piece of metal on the deck hand’s gear gets hang up and his hands and arms strain on the rim of the intake at the force being generated, the fan blades just inches from his face. Even switched off, it takes some long, agonizing seconds before the force slacks off enough for the sailor to be pulled back out.
One of the Concords (supersonic airliner) was fatally disabled when a piece of metallic debris on the runway was ingested into its engines, initiating a catastrophic failure.
Airfields, runways, and career decks constantly have to be cleared and monitored for debris, birds and other animals, and vagrants.
There was a video last year of a black women baggage handler being injested after getting too close.
The engine can suck a person into it with the person just standing there.
those big turbofan jet engines suck in a massive volume of air to combust the fuel ...
In the USAF and working on KC-135s when running engines on the ground at high rotations I often saw pools of rain water picked up from the ground and sucked into the engines. We always had pens in front to keep people from accidentally walking in front during such tests.
"On December 31, 2022, Courtney Edwards, a 34-year-old ramp agent for Piedmont Airlines was fatally sucked into a running jet engine at Montgomery Regional Airport in Alabama.
Edwards was approached by the strong suction of the left engine on an Embraer E175 jet while attempting to position safety cones. She was pulled off her feet and ingested into the operating engine, causing the aircraft to shake violently before an automatic shutdown."
Helluva way to go.
While at Kunsan Air Base, Korea, 1975-1976, no less frequently that every 25 minutes, there was a warning broadcast on Armed Forces Radio against being in front of the engines of the F-4 Phantom fighters for this very reason.
Frontier A321