The engines are designed so that a detached fan blade stays contained within the cowling. Here's a video of a fan blade containment test on a Rolls Royce Trent 500: https://youtu.be/RIOWjhjC1jM
The documentary didn't say why they wanted it to be at such a specific place, only that they did. I've long since forgotten the margin of error, but it was very small.
You probably noticed that the individual blade is painted a different color and is different colors. My recollection is that they use the multiple colors because they do very high definition recording and the colors are all in different areas of the spectrum, so they can observe it better as the thing tends to be quickly obscured by fire and smoke.
I probably do watch too many documentaries.
You are not alone. I actually watch more and more documentaries than movies or TV series. Reality is even stranger than fiction often.
I watch documentaries pretty much to the exclusion of all other genres, except American football. Even if I'm not actively paying attention, I'll frequently have a documentary playing in the background.
It's not a scholastic pursuit. It is purely entertainment. I watch them because I enjoy them. Learning is incidental and not the objective.
I like to queue up playlists of documentaries and let them play through. The 'net has been excellent at facilitating this.
Yes, but uncontained failures can and do happen. Qantas Flight 32 is an example of an uncontained engine failure on an A380, though with a Rolls Royce engine instead of Engine Alliance (GE + P&W). [0]
I do think they're very lucky that this uncontained engine failure didn't cause more damage. QF32 was heavily damaged by debris coming out of the engine, so the fact that this seems to be relatively contained to the engine itself is fortunate.
The Quantas flight is remarkable in that engine parts were not contained successfully and managed to damage critical systems inside the wing not related to the engine itself. Some reports say that the flight crew was overwhelmed by over 50 individual failure reports resulting from this damage. I was actually quite surprised when I learned that it was so easy to damage that many major systems with a seemingly small puncture in a wing.
When people talk of pilot-less airliners I have to think of incidents like this. Pilots do make mistakes and people die as a result, but when equipment fails and nobody dies because a pilot does what is needed to land safely despite the issue, it rarely makes news. Sometimes people on board don't even know.
That's the ideal general case. You really don't want hundreds of panicked people trapped in a broken tin can thousands of feet above ground while you're trying to handle the situation.
However, that brings up another question I've been wondering about: Could the pax/cabin crew of an airplane collaborate in bringing a jet down, by e.g. all together going to the very front of the plane (near the cockpit door), moving the trim up, then all running to the very end of the plane, bringing it into an uncontrollable stall?
I haven't really seen a satisfactory answer to that question. See Quora and Stackexchange (where I attempted an answer):
https://www.quora.com/Would-a-passenger-jet-stall-if-all-the...
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2507/can-passen...
One engine failed completely, two others were seriously degraded, aircraft control was minimal, fuel could not be dumped (leading to an overweight laading). The impression from one documentary was that the first officer spent much of his time overwhelmed with system reports which had to be cleared from his displays. Systems and information design and flows seem a net negative for this incident -- there is such a thing as too much information.
Overall, many reserve margins were exceedingly tight.
Your comment seems to me to grossly understate the severity, and overly credit Airbus and Rolls Royce, in this case
However, I'm wondering - would the blade go straight lateral? Or, relieved from having to pull the whole damn plane forward, would it fly forward and hit the fuselage in front of the engine? Or, slowed down by the air resistance, would it hit the fuselage behind the engine?
Best, I suppose, to sit up front in first class...
If you're concerned about which seats are safer, the ones in steerage in the back are the safest. They tend to arrive last at the scene of the accident :-)
Good shoes can save your life, because you can walk out over hot, burning wreckage.
Wear cotton, not synthetic, clothes, and you'll have less severe burn injuries.
And, of course, pay attention to where the exits are and the flight crew's safety instructions. They really do know what they're talking about, and they're well trained.
> They really do know what they're talking about, and they're well trained.
I wonder, btw, whether people on Saudia 163 would have survived if they had stormed the emergency exits after landing against (presumably) the orders of the crew...