How does an engine just suddenly blow up?
I am thinking the turbine blade housing came apart.
Strict maintenance and part replacement schedules are designed to prevent such failures.
Could it be defective Chinese steel?
It wouldn't surprise me.
Really? The body isn’t even cold yet and you’re trying to figure out who to blame?
Sure, I’ll play along. Yes, it could have been defective Chinese steel. Or maybe the Russians hacked the engine. Or maybe the Muslims sabotaged it somehow. I think that covers the major boogeymen. Perhaps we should move on to the minor ones?
Sounds like one of the blades on the engine separated. The ring that is supposed to catch faulty loose parts failed. How awful.
Would certainly be interesting to know.
RIP.
I was in an L-1011 out of Calgary when a strut
came loose and was sucked into its engine, breaking
turbine blades as it went. The plane shuddered
and the blades breaking sounded like a machine gun
being fired. My thought on the possibility of life
being over was, “Well, it’s been nice.”
No, the turbine blades are made from inconel, primarily a nickle based super alloy and a cast iron Hillary to work with in the machining end of things. Those things are tested in QC seven ways to Sunday before they ever see the inside of a turbine. Each batch is so stringent in their testing I doubt anyone would rely on a non-domestic source like China for their material for this exact reason.
I think that people really forget exactly the billions of miles we put on those things and just how much force is being contained and directed there, the speed of those things. We take it for granted that they will always be functioning without a hickup, and sometimes things like this just happen and we never really know what caused the failure.
There had been an alert to watch out for counterfeit aircraft bolts some years back.
I used to test-run them - not for the faint of heart.
The best laid plans of mice and men.
turbine blades are not steel but rather nickel based super alloys
It could be defective Chinese steel and coins.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40421811
In this case S#!t happened. When the engine is spinning at operational RPMs anything that upsets the balance can be catastrophic. A bearing could fail, a turbine bucket fails, it happens and is not all that uncommon.
The engine housing is designed to help contain the parts as they spray around but that is not failsafe.
The NTSB will definitely look at the maintenance records. The high stress components are inspected visually almost every week and undergo NDI check periodically. Military engines are scrutinized much more carefully than their civilian counterparts. Military places a premium on reliability, airlines, profit.
There are big heavy disks that hold the blades in place. The section that blew apart here is the bypass fan...those are the big blades you see at the front of the engine. There are a lot of root causes for fan, compressor and turbine disks to fail. Usually a single blade let’s go, often taking out other blades, but the whole fan disk doesn’t disintegrate. Seems like there have been two or three fan disk failures per year the last few years. This looks like catastrophic failure of the fan disk as the entire fan is gone. What is remarkable is that the ruptured fandango doesn’t cascade backward through the compressor and turbine.
It would be my guess that it’s more likely to be made out of titanium than steel.
The blades are not made of steel.
There have been unscrupulous sellers who will take an out of spec scrap part and put a serviceable tag on it and sell it.
Looks like a JT8D-200 series engine, manufactured by Pratt & Whitney. I believe a like a fan blade failure occurred, perhaps from a bird strike. Appears that the containment case failed.
On the news, it said the very same accident has happened on this airline before, but with no casualties. So as a Freeper suggest, if you travel this airline, DON’T sit by the engine.
One fan or compressor blade becoming unbalanced for any reason, or foreign body damage to a blade causing a harmonic vibration and domino effect on other blades, or over RPM. So many things, their mechanics will know with just a cursory look and data recorder. The pilots did a helluva job setting it down
Excerpt from below link
There are only two solid rules regarding jet engines; The airflow through the engine can never exceed the speed of sound and the maximum RPM isn't far from the point where the engine starts slinging compressor blades.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070209211033AA1JPw3
Fan blades break...it used to happen occasionally. UAL 232 (Sioux City) was a fan blade disintegration that severed the hydraulics lines in the tail. Remember the old B-727s that had the engines side by side at the tail? Everybody wanted to sit in those rear seats for the leg room...they were the most dangerous seats on that plane, with your head right next to an engine.