DENVER: Sound ran through the sky over Broomfield on Saturday afternoon. What followed was an equally unnatural and dangerous thing: small and large pieces of a huge turbine engine began to rain through the neighborhoods below the route of United Airlines Flight 328.
“We looked up at the sky and saw a lot of dark smoke and raining stuff from the sky,” Lisa Hill told Denver7, who was walking through an open space near her home. “We thought maybe the birds were hitting the engine and they were the little things we saw falling, but they were actually big things, they just looked small a few miles away.”
The Boeing 777-200, which was heading to Honolulu, just suffered a right engine failure shortly after takeoff. The plane turned around and returned to Denver International Airport, landing safely. No one on board or ashore was injured.
But what caused such an incomparable engine failure? Researchers will look for this answer to such a rare fact in the coming months. But Tom Haueter, an ABC News consultant and former director of NTSB’s Office of Air Safety, has an idea of what they might be looking for.
“What will the researchers look at, collect all the parts, look at the photographs, take a look at the engine maintenance records, the history of the engine, when it was manufactured, what is the service life, how many hours are there ?, how many cycles, how many flights there were, you start collecting all the information, ”Haueter told ABC News.
Shortly after the incident, photos and videos began appearing on social media. To aviation experts like Haueter, these posts offer a clue as to what might have happened.
“Looking at the pictures I’ve seen, it looks like a piece of one of the fan blades, these are the big blades you can see when you look from the engine from the outside, it’s missing a piece of the fan blade, and I can’t tell from another photograph if another fan blade is missing completely, “Haueter said.
Engine debris fell over a wide area of Broomfield, affecting homes and property in the Northmoor and Red Leaf neighborhoods. Parts were seen scattered over parks, lawns and rooftops. But Haueter said one of the most important pieces the authorities have to find is the missing fan blade.
“The really important piece to be again would be the fan blade or pieces of the fan blade. You want to have two faces of failure to say, “Okay, that’s what happened.” Was there a nickname on the leaf? Was there any defect in the blade? Was there anything else? There are a lot of pieces, but only a few are really critical to the research, ”he said.
The video captured by a passenger aboard a 328 flight on Saturday showed the engine failure in flight before the pilots made an emergency landing. Passengers are likely to feel the explosion and vibrations until DAY.
“Well, basically when something like this happens, the engine is extremely unbalanced. Turbine engines are designed with all this massive rotation to be very smooth, obviously. When you lose a piece of it, you now have a lot of vibration. Parts start rubbing that don’t normally rub, loose parts start to vibrate for the fuel system, so suddenly a crack in the fuel line can occur, ”Haueter said.“ You have friction due to “It looks pretty dramatic, let’s be honest, but unless the engine catches fire and has a major fire, it looks worse than it is.” .
Investigators will not know exactly what happened until they break the engine. A National Transportation Safety Board team is heading to the area to take over the investigation, police said.
Although Haueter said what happened on Saturday is very rare, some do not take risks. The Ministry of Transportation of Japan instructed Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways, which operate aircraft equipped with the same series of engines, to attack the Boeing 777s in their fleet.
The transport ministry also refers to a “serious incident” that occurred on a Japan Airlines flight on December 4 last year, where the same type of engine was damaged (Pratt & Whitney PW4000 series).