A 777 almost had a tragic ending in February Because the right engine had failed after losing 2 fan blades. Luckily, the skilled pilots kept their cool & was able to limp the crippled plane plack back to Denver & land it safely
A little bit sensationalistic for a quasi-uncontained engine failure*. As visually dramatic as the incident was, the 777 is designed to be able to fly on one engine for hours. The pressure vessel of the fuselage was undamaged (only the non-structural aerodynamic fairing around the wing root was damaged by the disintegrating engine cowl), and while the crew handled the situation well, the aircraft was hardly crippled. (United 232, the DC-10 that lost its #2 engine and hydraulics in 1989,
that was crippled.)
*"Uncontained" in "uncontained engine failure" is a technical term referring to whether the fan blades and other internal parts of the engine escape the containment ring in the nacelle. In this incident, they did not, meaning it's technically "uncontained". The fact that the cowling separated and the engine very dramatically burned anything it still could once the fuel flow was cut off made for very dramatic images which provoke some considerable dissonance when it's called "contained" even if that is in the strictest technical sense true.
The plane was 26 years old - probably too old be used. Again, this comes from using equipment that is too old & begins to become too dangerous to operate. Pratt & Whitney took responsibility for the engine.
26 is on the older side for mainline jets, but it's not the number that matters. Flight hours and cycles (roughly analogous to flights) are what matters, and there's no particular reason planes cannot fly for a great many years so long as they're adequately maintained and haven't hit their hours/cycles ceilings. Most jets get retired (at least from domestic passenger carriage) after 20 to 30 years because the increasing costs of maintenance and advances in engine and aircraft design mean they're no longer economically efficient rather than mechanically too old let alone dangerous. The NTSB is still investigating the United incident. It's quite clear that one of the fan blades separated due to metal fatigue, taking another one with it and separating the cowl. It would seem more likely than not (the final report will presumably answer this question) that either United, P&W, or both did not have sufficient procedures to identify incipient metal fatigue pre-failure. Your mileage may vary as to whether or not that's a failure of government oversight and regulation.
It's a shame that the system of the law waits for innocent lives to be lost before fixing something.
The system of law waits for legal problems before 'fixing' something. Regulations may be insufficient, and regulators may well lack imagination at times, but it is literally impossible to predict and plan for everything. Unfortunately, sometimes unanticipated, maybe completely unpredictable circumstances may arise that result in fatalities. (We can go back quite some time to the first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, which had an unfortunate tendency to explode because the effects of metal fatigue around square windows in pressurized jet airliners was not known, because it was the first one ever.) I don't know if the legal system comments were meant to refer to the new cars or not (seeing as how they haven't incurred any fatalities) but that's another example where it may have been literally impossible to predict that the side bearer pads would wear unexpectedly quickly such that they could contribute to a derailment before the problem could be detected and rectified. That's not waiting until lives of loss out of some evil-lawyer apathy; that's the problem either literally not existing or not reasonably being predictable until it manifests, which is something completely different. (Leaving aside that we really should distinguish between the regulatory system, which I think is often too reactive and unimaginative in practice, and the legal system, which is literally designed to require that a legal injury has occurred or will occur in order to bring a case in the first place.)
Hopefully this time, the problems with the new trains are fixed once & for all.
One can hope, though I doubt it. I'd certainly hope that this is the last of the major problems sufficient to pull them from service (for any meaningful length of time), but there will almost certainly still be other teething problems, considering we're still quite early into their service lives. As others have mentioned as well, annoying as this is, it's also normal for things to go wrong. The point isn't to get them in service as quickly as possible, the point is to get them to work properly, unlike the Boeings (the T's benchmark for atrociously bad equipment). We're nowhere near Boeing territory or even Breda territory yet.
