Leslie

I was wondering the same and then thought the same as you. We always had the APU running for takeoff and landing in case of engine failure close to the ground, most likely to be due to birdstrikes. As Billy the Kid says, it would have supported our flight controls in a degraded but usuable condition. We also had a Ram Air Turbine which would have kept us going until the APU was running if necessary. Pulling the RAT handle would also shed non essential electrical loads. It was a standard procedure in case of a double engine failure after takeoff.

Interesting to hear that the A320 has a "ditching" mode. What good thinking and it may well have saved lives in this case.

Les

dpb

Its yours if you take it away

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Has anyone considered that these were Al Quaeda trained suicide birds ?

j4ckos mate

why cany they put mesh over the engine nacelles?

i suppose their must be a reason as its so obvious

spireite

This is not the modding section

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

I think with an engine producing 27,000 lbs of thrust, drawing in that much air the bird would, instead of being whole when it hits the blades would be in chunks, still disastrous for the engine and I suppose it would bugger up the airflow into the engine, possibly drawing the mesh in.

Instead, perhaps a Scarecrow mounted on the top of the fuselage would be more effective, in fact modeled on you, you have scared a fair number of birds in your time.

Leslie

Mesh that was strong enough to withstand the airflow and birds as well would be too much of a restriction to airflow entering the engine. It would be quite a bit of extra weight too. Overall it is best to have nothing in front of the engine which could itself be drawn in anyway.

Les

Skoobie Dhu

iTrader: (3)

Try 19 minutes and a successful(ish) landing without engines.

Air Transat Flight 236 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diesel

FPMSL

What an astonishing achievement - an amazing man with an equally amazing name. As Les says let him have Blair's dodgy gong!!!

There has to be a better solution to the bird thing though - so many could have died here.

When I worked at an RAE establishment they sent a bloke in a Landrover with a megaphone and soundtracks of birds of prey to scare off birds before any take off and landing. Rather primitive!!!

D

LG John

I'm pretty sure jet engines are capable of dealing with the odd bird hit. A flock on the other hand I got bored one day and did a lot of reading about the different types of jet engines and how they work. Very interesting and also remarkably simple.

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Yes, I doubt a Quail would destroy a jet engine but I suspect anything much bigger than a Pigeon might cause problems.

I had my own bird strike last summer, was on my pushbike and had a Pheasant launched itself out of a hedgerow, scary.

This has probably been posted before but its a bird strike on a 757 at Manchester, well worth ten minutes, very reassuring how professional and calm everyone was.

YouTube - ThomsonFly 757 bird strike & flames captured on video

boomer

Hudson Crash from Coast Guard Camera

Some of the earlier "BBC footage", plus more (total 10 minutes).

mb

FlightMan

We use a bird of prey, bird scarers, tapes of birds of prey and also guns!

Fuzz

Various videos flying about

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | New pictures show NY plane crash

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Leslie

It depends on the strength of the blades in the first compressor stage as to how much they can resist as far as a bird or more is concerned.

The Olympus engine, although very powerful had very large blades in the first stage but the construction was very thin for lightness. They were pretty fragile and a medum size bird would destroy the first stage. In the Vulcan the engines were in pairs side by side and if a bird broke the blades, that engine would surge and cough the blades forwards into the other engine, thus failing that one too. If we lost an engine like that it was assumed that you would always lose both. Luckily it would normally fly pretty well on the two that were left.

A seagull was big enough to do all that, as I discovered the hard way once.

Not surprised that he lost both his engines in a flock of geese!

Les

FlightMan

YouTube - BIRD VS. JET ENGINE (In Super-Slow-Motion)

Leslie

Interesting film that. Those blades are pretty strong to withstand that as well as they did. That will be a bypass engine I think and that was the bypass fan which was standing up to it.

We always wished the first stage compressor blades on the Olympus were that tough.

Les

Leslie

I have got a turbine blade from one of XM 607 Vulcan's engines which is the one which dropped the bomb on the runway in the Falklands. Its something I treasure.

Les

Snazy

Plane Crash: 'Hudson Plane Had Earlier Troubles With Engines' | World News | Sky News

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

I think thats probably inccidental. Its not a wanted on aircraft engine, but it does happen.

Snazy

Guess I should have written the text I meant to lol.
I was gonna say, have a look at the news, and see how long it takes before it turns into a witch hunt.

Would be a shame to see an amazing story of survival and heroics, turn into a messy witch hunt.

DaveD

iTrader: (2)

That's an interesting video, which shows two different engines.

The first, I think, is a GE engine. The blades that impact the bird show typical 'soft body' damage where the leading edge of the blade forms a cupped shape and becomes permantly deformed.

The second engine (a Rolls Royce Trent 900 as used on the A380) shows the 'large bird' ingestion test. The bird (a carefully chosen duck) is fired by compressed air into the engine, which is running at max take off power. The most amazing part of the super slow motion is that you can see the massive difflection of the fan blade. This blade is three feet in length, hollow, and made from titanium. The blade wobbles as it spins at over 3,000 rpm, but when the engine is shut down, will appear to be virtually undamaged. The blade looks like it's made of rubber, but it is extremely stiff - the wobbling in the video shows just how much energy the blade absorbs with just one bird - trying to design something that could cope with multiple large birds just isn't realistic!

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Why is the duck carefully chosen ?

Surely in a real ingestion the bird in question cannot be vetted ?