Are aircraft engines safe?
By: Alkan Akyildiz
Tags: Aircraft Engine, Aircraft, Aircraft Maintenance, Aviation, Pilot

While it’s almost impossible for both aircraft engines to stop at the same time, there may be several reasons for this, such as hitting a flock of birds, volcanic volcano ashes, systematic malfunctions, and running out of fuel. Pilots are given very rigorous training for all of these possibilities, (some emergency exams pass grade is 100. Pilots are required to know these situations completely) and all situations are simulated many times in the simulator phase. In fact, since such emergencies are not experienced very often, companies run their pilots in the simulator regularly and ensure that they do not forget. If the pilots fail in these simulator flights, their flight is interrupted and time is given to complete their deficiencies. In such situations, the knowledge and skill of pilots are as important as their cold bloodedness and ability to make quick decisions. As we will all remember, in the movie Sully, the pilots made the most logical decision in the best possible time according to the engine failure they experienced, and this miraculous story of salvation emerged.

The advancing technology and aviation industry has made aircraft engines close to perfection as well as increasing the comfort of airplanes. Today, the probability of an aircraft engine stopping while underway has a statistic of one in a million. Most of the accidents happen due to reasons other than motor, and 43% of these accidents happen on take-off, 41% on landing and only 16% on level flight.

Of course, it is extremely scary for everyone to see an engine in flames while looking out your window with your coffee on your flight, where you expect everything to go well. However, except for such situations, even if the engine of the plane you are flying on stops, if there is no structural damage or fire in the engine, it is very unlikely that you will even notice it. These state-of-the-art engines with powers up to 160,000 hp have many international standards. The most important of these is ETOPS (Extended-range Twin Operations). In the route where your plane will fly, there must be an airport where it can land safely within this Etops period, and the routes are calculated taking these times into consideration. The Etops time for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner is 330 minutes, while for the Airbus A350 it is 370 minutes. In other words, these planes can safely fly with a single engine for more than 5 hours in case of any malfunction and divert to a nearby airport

As the closest example to this, we can give the incident of the Boeing 777 type aircraft of United Airlines, which made the Denver-Honolulu flight on February 20. Shortly after taking off from Denver, the aircraft, which had structural damage and a fire broke out, returned to Denver shortly afterwards and landed safely and no one even bleed from a nose. (You can access the video of the event by clicking here.) You can encounter this and many similar examples on the internet. The low number of such events and the interest of many people in the aviation industry cause the events to spread sensationally. You can take a look at the videos of aircraft engine failures and emergency landing from the links below.

See you in the next articles, have safe flights …

Links:

https://bit.ly/31raP4n

https://bit.ly/3u1LE4x

https://bit.ly/3rAl7JT