Metal shards from Boeing 787 taking off over Rome rain down on people below
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
The plane in question was a 5.5-year-old Boeing 787-8 with the registration LN-LND. The parts are believed to have come from the left engine, a Rolls-Royce Trent 1000, a model that has been plagued with problems.
Link about the problems: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/rolls-royce-problems-trent-100...
Cracking problems in the intermediate pressure (IPT) section of the turbine have plagued the engine since early 2016, five years after its launch. Unscheduled groundings of Trent 1000-powered aircraft cost Rolls-Royce some £450m last year, and Horwood said that addressing the problem was “the single most important issue” currently facing the company.
One of Rolls-Royce’s most important potential customers for Trent 1000, Air New Zealand, recently announced that it has opted for General Electric power-plants for a new batch of 787-10 airliners, although its 787-9 fleets still fly with Trent engines.
I'm reminded of all the jokes Jeremy Clarkson makes at Rolls Royce's expense...
Rolls-Royce Holdings only makes aero engines, the cars are made by BMW.
as of 1998.
Most of Clarksons' jokes are in reference to the 70s and 80s era of Rolls Royce -- which is known among auto enthusiasts as one of the least reliable group of cars to have ever existed.
One you’re driving.
One in the shop.
One in the garage in case the one you’re driving goes to the shop before the other one is repaired.
If you know it to be factually wrong then fine, but at least comment to say why it's wrong to save everyone else the bother of searching wikipedia for various incarnations of Rolls Royce to find that is does seem to have split in 1971.
The 70s rollers were of their era... All cars were unreliable then!
Is there a point you wanted to make or is this a non-sequitur?
I was in Poland and 23 hours before my flight, it was completely cancelled. I spent hours on the phone and finally was able to schedule another flight 3 days later. The problem is the airline knew these airplanes need to be grounded for maintenance much often but continued booking flights as usual. British airlines started losing similar lawsuits recently.
I would not be surprised if someone sued Boeing or RR.
A 787 that is out one engine will put extra load on the remaining engine, if that one has gone through a similar life as the one that just dropped bits all over the place I'd not wager on the remaining one being as safe as when it was last inspected. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.
And they don't glide particularly well either, though there are some interesting stories around passenger aircraft and glide landings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
But that one had a good 9000 meters more height to work with and it wasn't over densely populated area either.
Nonsense! Modern airlines glide exceptionally well. For example a 787 has a glide ratio of over 20:1 !
http://www.lissys.demon.co.uk/samp1/
https://seekingalpha.com/article/2494925-boeing-the-airbus-a...
You can't just land a 787 on a bit of farmland. BTW if you have to deadstick a commercial plane then the 787 is probably the best, it has the best glide ratio of all commercial planes in service today. But I'd hate for that to be put to the test.
To be fair though, I can safely land a Stationair on 700ft of dirt so my options are a bit better than a 787..
A brick has a glide ratio somewhere worse than 1:10; the shuttle (at subsonic speeds) is closer to a sailplane (~40:1, or ~9× better than the shuttle) than a brick (more than 50× worse).
Unless you have to turn around to face back to the airport. You've lost a lot of altitude in the turn in that case.
That's why there are restrictions on which RR engines can be put in a 787 as well as a reduction in the ETOPS certification. There've been a few revisions to the Trent, and putting two of the more "unfixed" ones on one airframe is verboten.
For such a critical component, I figured they would adopt the military position: "2 is one... one is none".
So having one "less safe" engine still means everything is much much safer than the drive to the airport.
That's a statement that I'd be happy to see the numerical support for. To hold the number of fatalities of people driving to the airport in total needs to exceed the number of fatalities as a result of airplanes crashing after one engine already failed on a relative scale, related to the number of people on board those aircraft that had one engine fail.
Keep in mind that the chances for messing stuff up increase once one engine is out simply because all your eggs are in a single basket.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/02/transasia-cras...
This puts the counter at 43 against. I'm sure that we can dig up other examples. I think one engine out is a sufficient change of the underlying stats that the per-passenger mile quote might no longer be valid.
Of course the other input required is how many planes have single engine failures.
If memory serves Rolls placed the blame on the initial problems with the Trent 1000 on air quality in SE Asia (high sulfur content specifically). Which is to say, I don't get the impression that certification was done sloppily.
Are planes required to have one old-reliable engine?
Reliability is (theoretically) improved. From following threads on a.net and pprune it seems like Norwegian actually demanded new engines instead of repaired older ones.
Personally, I'm of the mindset that engines are fantastically safe these days. Piston engines were notoriously unreliable, and even older jet engines were deemed unreliable enough to require more than two for oversea crossings. Look back to when the L-1011 was introduced. It was late due to problems with the Rolls Royce RB-211 (predecessor to the Trent family). Even after the L-1011 began service in-flight shutdowns were pretty common. What we're seeing with the 787 is seemingly less frequent and has provoked a stronger reaction. Of course GE (CFM) isn't immune to problems either and if you look back over their history they've had a few nasty problems including that fairly recent Southwest flight with a passenger fatality.
The argument goes that what killed the A380 wasn't having 4 engines, but having 4 old engines. All the newer planes have engines at least 1 if not 2 generations newer. Notably, the A380 wasn't cancelled until it became crystal clear that engine manufacturers weren't going to invest in redesigned engines. That's when the Emirates order fell through. While their year long dance with Airbus over pricing is what got the most press, it was the backroom negotiations with Rolls Royce that controlled whether the A380 remained cost effective.
What you've posted though seems way more plausible though I've gotta admit.
I think this is the article I originally read,
https://leehamnews.com/2018/12/13/has-the-a380-worse-economi...
but it's paywalled. Here's an older article with similar points,
https://leehamnews.com/2015/12/11/bjorns-corner-twins-or-qua...
As a related factoid BMW doesn't sell some of its engines in North American, Australian and Malaysian markets due to high sulphur content in the fuel (e.g. [1]). It would be interesting if the same thing happened for aircraft engines and South-East Asian air.
Keep in mind, "catastrophic" is a loaded word in aviation safety parlance. It specifically means that failure of a system or component threatens total unrecoverable loss of the aircraft; and is the point where redundancy and fail-safe become required by law in order to certify.
The regulation specifies no single point of failure should result in catastrophic loss.
Any failure is news worthy, but this poster is on point. Chernobyl meme opportunity aside.
https://roma.corriere.it/foto-gallery/cronaca/19_agosto_10/a...?
they don't seem melted, rather broken/fractured.
So... not great but not horrifying?
Depends where they land. Rain on a crowded playground and that's catastrophic for many reasons.
Same term is used for a shattered turbine disc. It destroys the engine and is not contained so there is a risk to other components.
With redundant hydraulic/fuel/oil systems as well, much can happen to the engine without turning the airplane into a brick with passengers in it.
That being said, I am glad I am not on the Trent 1000 design team.
The placement of the dents on all the fins reminds me a bit of that. Looks to me like something broke off, got wedged under one of those stabilizers, smacking the hell out of every single fin on the way before it was finally thrown clear.
In SF, it’s common for car thieves to break windows using a small chip (size of a pencil eraser) of ceramic from a spark plug. The ceramic is super hard but light weight and can shatter a window easily.[1] being hit by it would barely register.
That said anything-metal falling from the sky is dangerous.
It has very little to do with Boeing in this case. But blaming Boeing in the title gets you more clicks, and clicks equals money for journalism.
Boeing is not free of responsibility here, they chose to sell said engines as an option on their planes. They have worked together with Rolls Royce to integrate their engines with their plane. In theory, engine problems could even be caused by Boeing's software mismanaging the engines.
It is not rare for plane contracts and engine contracts to not be signed simultaneously: the engine maker might be decided months after the contract for the 787 is firmed. Aircraft engines do not qualify as "some 3rd party component".
A slightly better comparison (but not perfect) would be if you buy a server from Dell with an Intel microprocessor, and there's an issue with that Intel chip: will you blame Intel or Dell? After all you could have picked a Dell server with an AMD processor.
The engines are also mounted to the air-frame at Boeing's facilities (since the plane can't really leave under its own power until that happens), so whether the airline pays Boeing or R-R for the engine is just an administrative detail.
As for the server comparison, if you buy a Dell computer, your warranty is from Dell. If something needs to be fixed, Dell will do it and then argue with Intel about who foots the final bill.
The airplane world is a lot more complex, and that is exactly my point – the blame is not 100% with R-R and 0% with Boeing – or vice versa. There's plenty of blame to go around.
The contract is signed directly between the airline and the engine maker. Of course the engines are installed by the OEM (Boeing, Airbus, etc.), as otherwise delivering the plane would be problematic to say the least...
EDIT: another, more relevant example: Norwegian ordered 19 Boeing 787-9 in October 2015, and selected Rolls-Royce to power them in February 2016 (https://atwonline.com/engines/norwegian-selects-rolls-royce-...)
So airlines sign big contracts with engine manufacturers for new engines, parts, supplies, training, etc.
This also happens even with small single engine airplanes, those engines need overhauls every so many thousand hours, so one option is to trade in your old engine for a refurbished one instead of overhauling and keeping the same engine. For some larger fleets companies have contracts with engineer manufacturers or service centers for this.
Airplane parts are intertwined believe it or not, their engineers spend years working together.
May as well start 26 shell companies named BoeingA to BoeingZ and pretend it was all someone else's fault.
On the bright side, Rolls seem to have sorted out most issues from the 1000 in their newer engine the XWB.
Well that really inspires confidence.
The new engines are still suffering these same problems, very good chance Norwegian has the newer variant as the older ones are mostly grounded and I'm quite sure Boeing agreed to replace them all years ago.
https://simpleflying.com/singapore-airlines-787-10-engine-is...
For better or worse it appears Boeing is practicing https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
It appears to work in software, so unless demonstrated otherwise I assume it's effective in other engineering disciplines. We can learn from the equivalents of the FAA in other countries where blame automatically gets assigned based on who is in charge, it leads to finger-pointing and worse safety records/poorer investigations: watch a few seasons of Mayday: Air Crash Investigations to see the pattern. You see it especially in more autocratic countries where hierarchy is rigid. One especially good example is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, there's a good chance we would've found the plane if everyone in the government wasn't practicing CYA which led to significant delays and made the search exponentially harder. Compare that to Air France Flight 447 where the right information was shared with the world immediately (and it still took us two years to find the black boxes).
The ability to fly for extended distances on a single engine is something modern long haul aircraft are designed for and pilots trained for, and even if it's a RR-engined aircraft you're probably more likely to have engine issues with birdstrikes than the apparent metal fatigue issues with the Trent 1000. Looking at the size of those parts that apparently fell I'd feel more unsafe on the ground!
I'm exaggerating a bit about my concern. I know the statistics on modern aviation safety, even with Boeing's, uh, recent track record on such things.
Frankly, in the grand scheme of things, I'm more concerned about my safety driving in Tel Aviv than I am about my flight getting there ;)
That's about 15[1]/45000000 for 2018, not sure what the longer term trends are. So your chances of dying due to an airplane crash if the distribution is random is 1 in 3 million give or take. With 'bits falling out of the engine' the distribution is of course no longer random.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/02/health/plane-crash-deaths...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2018/12/28/air...
edit: found better figures.
https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/aeroengine-composit...
GE has also had problems with the GEnx including a double engine failure on a 787.
Engine parts melt and fall off, and the plane doesn't seem disturbed. Awesome engineering!
Light on your car light, bullets on tin.
Most lyrics sites seem to have the lyrics you said, but there's still some with the version I thought. I can't find any official source of lyrics either.
I've now listened to the video clip[1] a dozen times trying to figure out which it is, and honestly I'm no closer.
Anyway, there was likely nothing Boeing could do at the early design stage to make up for poor choices on the engine manufacturers part except a higher degree of scrutiny with regards to the actual manufacturing facility and essentially double checking all of RR's work.
Considering they are questionable at certifying their own work, I'd not necessarily look to burden them with being an engine manufacturer on top of an airframe one. As irritating to me as that is that quality departments typically don't integrate vertically or even share that type of info to enable that type of analysis.
GE, for all of its faults as a corporation (the stock price is what, $9-something now?), makes very good jet engines.