I'm going to bet those GE Aviation technicians that they charter anywhere to fix planes are unbelievably talented, experienced and well paid. I bet they've got all the best stories.
Also: on the first page, second paragraph of the special coverage, what does "Check Airman" mean?
Anecdote: My dad did this in the 70s. I believe you’re correct. He was working overseas and was frequently dispatched to countries without modern repair facilities such as Saudi Arabia.
One story that stands out is he asked a local worker to warm up the APU. The worker proceeded to build a fire under the APU, destroying it. What he meant was start it up and let it run until it reaches operating temperature.
I might get some of the backstory halfway off, but my grandfather was in Alaska during WWII for the construction of the Alaska Highway. They tried to never turn off truck and equipment engines because if you did, you had to build a fire under them to get them warm enough to start again.
In my experience, it's all cars in Canada- I've never seen one that doesn't have it (other than imports). I guess you could probably get away without it on the west coast.
Most cars do start though. It’s really a maintenance issue, where it’s bad for your car to start it at -30 (as the linked article says). In my experience, a newer car in decent shape will start consistently.
You'd have a very hard time starting a diesel without a block heater. When I lived in Canada I kept an older Ford (a 1949 one!) around for winter use because the diesel tractor was that much harder to start. You can make things a bit better by mixing about 5% gasoline in with the diesel to avoid the diesel becoming flaky but that has limits too and the Canadian winters can throw -40 Celsius at you with some regularity.
Yeah my E39 doesn't have any sort of heater and it came from BC. I've not seen anywhere to plug a block heater in though BMW did sell auxiliary coolant heaters (from Webasto). Of course if I lived in a climate where block heaters were required a BMW wouldn't be my first choice. The heated seats and steering wheel come in handy more than I thought they would tho.
-Block heaters are quite common in Norway, too - and while my old diesel will start in -30C without one, it does not like it. (I cheat, though - the starter motor is pilfered from a light truck, and two batteries with approx. 800 CCA each work in parallel to make it turn over; it was a necessity as there is no electricity where we park the car before heading for our cabin in the mountains...)
In addition to less engine wear, it also works wonders for fuel consumption and makes the car comfortably warm in a couple of minutes.
Based on your name, I suggest coming west, but not too far west :). Trying to start a car at -40 in SK is rough... if you've got a good battery and thin oil you might be able to, but it's so much nicer after the block heater's been going for a few hours.
Gasoline powered cars in good repair will start just fine any any temperature the North American continent can provide. Block heaters are to speed warmup and reduce wear.
Old farm tractors used what was called "farm oil" in the old days. Basically the cheapest form of fuel you could buy since it was effectively a byproduct of the refining process. It was closer to paraffin wax than diesel, solid at room temperature. In order to start the tractor there was a second tank with diesel that was used until the engine warmed up enough to melt the primary fuel. If your tractor stalled out and you couldn't get it started again quickly the fuel would solidify in the lines and you would have to light a fire under the tractor to get it started.
I didn't have airplane engines in mind when I wrote that (tanks = vehicles) but given the thread context and your airplanes reference I see how that could happen, same thing with 'block heaters' elsewhere in the thread, I take it that is in the context of other vehicles (heavy equipment, tractor-trailers, buses and so on).
And yes, some airplane engines use gas but the majority of them runs something that in constituency is closer to regular diesel than to gas.
Kersone is #1 diesel!
AV gas is another matter entirely but I'm not aware of any jet that would use it, though that might be a fun thing, and given that turbines can run on almost anything combustible it will probably work to some extent but I don't think it will be a happy ending unless the engine is really designed for it.
It’s rare to have an engine that just drips fuel. Lubrication oil for sure, but straight up petrol leaks for a non-running engine require a lot of things to be wrong.
You're talking about a very heavily used airplane in a barely usable airfield with desperate mechanics, often under attack, adverse weather, and parts shortages.
hey at least they decided not to use hypergolic fuel in the sr-71 tho having a jet that was on fire all the time would be pretty bad ass looking. Titanium would probbably handle it and it'd eventually warm up the skin and close the gaps.
Whilst the SR-71 didn't run on hypergolic fuel (because reasons -- including leaky tanks and supersonic skin-heating, so JP-7, which specifically has a high flash point was used for fuel), the ignition system for the aircraft, including its afterburner ignition system, used hypergolic fuel (triethylborane) to initiate combustion, with a limited number of ignition cycles aboard each mission.
Afterburner light-ups were limited by the availability of TEB aboard.
I remember thinking from one of the books on the sr71 equating restarts to setting off a stick of Dynamite in the tailpipe... But I was younger then and didn't know about these fuels. Thanks for the details
The WWII Liberty Ships utilised a triple-expansion steam engine, fired by bunker fuel. Both the expended steam and the boilers were used to fluidise the fuel to flowable tempertures -- the steam circulating either through or around the feed tanks, and the fuel line itself passing through the boiler and flame trench before final injection.
There are two remaining Liberty Ships in the US -- the John W. Brown in Baltimore, and the Jeremiah O'Brien in San Francisco.
Pay a visit and one of the engine-room crew can tell you the details.
The generaly kluginess and hackiness of the design instantly brought to mind what many software projects I've worked on might look like if physically instantiated. Though the Liberty Ship design is by far the more robust and useful than most.
American liberty ships used steam engines because US industry had been building cargo ships for the Brits and wanted to avoid the delay of switching to a more modern design. The Brits specified steam engines so they could run the ships on coal so they wouldn't have to import the fuel.
The more modern takes on this likely include "greasecar" diesel conversions that still have a small diesel tank, plus the different summer and winter blends of diesel fuel itself (since "A" diesel that gels at 5C is going to be a problem in a lot of places).
My family was stationed near London for a time. My father told me later that once an airline pilot mistook a WW2 strip for the Heathrow runway (!) and landed there, using every inch of it to get it to stop. The strip was too short to take off from, so what to do?
They stripped everything off the airplane they could. Seats, interiors, galleys, everything. They put in just enough fuel to hop over the trees to Heathrow. He said they did it, but barely.
The interesting thing is that „the end of the runway“ is actually a major river.
And a Vuelling flight almost made the same mistake two years ago (but today it would be less critical as they have extended the runway to accommodate A380s some time ago).
I'm trying to google a similar "we landed here but now it's too short for us to takeoff again" story which IIRC happened in California, but I can only find this incident that happened with a cargo plane in Kansas: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/11/giganti...
This has happened more than a few times in Wichita. They are usually aiming for KICT but hit other airports. We had to file a flight plan out of Jabara for a private jet that was actually trying to land at KICT for maintenance. Didnt make the news but we did have to plan for the minimum amount of fuel.
Sorta similar situation happened a few years back in Wichita Kansas. A 747 Dreamlifter (what Boeing uses to fly 787 fuselages) landed at Jabara airport (corporate jet airport) instead of the Air Force base 9 miles south of it. The videos online don’t give it justice, but from folks I know there, it was a frightful takeoff.
I once owned a Lada Niva, which while it was overall a rather - to put it charitably - interesting car to own, it excelled during wintertime.
The engine sump was incredibly heavy; when inquiring as to why, I was told the idea was that you could light a (small!) fire under it to make it easier to get the engine cranking in severe cold.
"Check Airman" -- likely a 3rd pilot in the cockpit, probably for observation/rating. Since this is a 9+ hour ETOPS* flight (over-ocean), there should be at least 4 pilots on board anyways. Airline ground flight ops will also get involved.
* ETOPS: Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards; jokingly referred to as "Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim"
I'm going to bet those GE Aviation technicians that they charter anywhere to fix planes are unbelievably talented, experienced and well paid.
Airframe manufacturers like Airbus and Boeing have similar teams (AOG – Aircraft on Ground). The logistics and skills are just staggering. Delta dented a 757 pretty hard in Azores last year and had it patched up and back in the US pretty darn quickly. Stuff like this is exactly why neither the Russians nor Chinese are any threat to the Airbus/Boeing hegemony.
This is one of the reasons that Panasonic has a stronghold on IFE/Sat Connectivity equipment. They have service teams to support the airlines around the world.
Back when I worked at Boeing they had the AOG (Airplane On Ground) crew to do this sort of thing. Their job was to be on call 24/7 and do whatever it took to get that airplane back in the air, and they pretty much had a blank check to do it.
Naturally, they were the best mechanics Boeing had.
An airplane makes money only when it is flying. When it is sitting on the ground, it loses money at a prodigious rate. A large focus of the engineering on the 757 I worked on was to keep that airplane flying as much as possible.
I understand that Microsoft has a similar crew they can dispatch to any customer to get their business software working again. This is how Microsoft is able to successfully compete against free software.
"Prodigious Rate" -- To put this in context, the latest numbers I saw is about $125 per min of unscheduled delay. It also doesn't take that many delays to wipe profitability to zero.
Southwest had a really memorable slogan: “wheels up” and the business really rallied around that priority ruthlessly for many years. It was pretty cool and gets used in business analysis as an example a lot about how to achieve big goals.
The How I Built This podcast on Southwest [0] with Kelleher (since deceased) is an amazing episode. Both for trivia and giving context to what it takes to be successful behind the scenes.
Kelleher (a lawyer by training) ran a private practice while litigating a 3-year lawsuit against airline incumbents at the time... before Southwest flew its first flight in Texas.
And when asked "Why?" As in, why didn't you stop, return to law, or do something easier, he basically said "Because it didn't seem fair. Or right. That they could keep us from flying."
I'm sure he had his fair share of sharp business decisions, but he came across as a truly great human being.
The highest revenue per hour route is JFK to Heathrow at $24,639 [1]. A 787-800 costs about $8000/hr [2]. So that's about $277/min of revenue. Yeah, $125/min sounds about right for an average route.
Even if they own the planes outright, the interest cost of the airplanes remains the same (because the money tied up in the airplane could be otherwise put to use earning interest).
For example, conventional wisdom is that owning your own home outright is a Good Thing. But if mortgage interest rates are low, taking out a mortgage and investing in something that pays more than that interest rate is a Better Thing.
> But if mortgage interest rates are low, taking out a mortgage and investing in something that pays more than that interest rate is a Better Thing.
Yes, but there's extra risk that way. That strategy depends on either the investment returning enough every month to pay the mortgage for that month, or another funding source (like a salary) being available every month to do so. If for some reason neither are available on a given month, you risk losing your home.
It varies. Some airlines are printing money like it’s their job and have very savvy purchasing teams. Large piles of cash spent on second hand aircraft can really help soften the blow when times get tough. Although in the current market some are even spending cash on NEW airframes which is really kind of crazy.
But speaking globally, I would say you’re likely right. The majority of airlines are very heavily leveraged and as soon as the economy softens we’ll see at least a few casualties again.
"Naturally, they were the best mechanics Boeing had."
I know people who do this kind of work, but are they really the best?
- As long you hold a screwdriver in your hand, you are No.2 in salary.
- Family, your child has birthday, something to show you in school or sport? Forget it, 5 minutes before it starts, you get always a call. So you have no family (anymore).
- 9 to 5 nah.. more like 9 plus 5 hours to work a day.
- Friends, forget it you don't have any.
But of course they have storys to tell. But why would you choose a such life?
I imagine these 8 executives are there to lay down suppressive fire, keeping customer's management at bay so that the engineers can go in and fix the problem uninterrupted.
Hehe. The comparison is both amusing and apt. I’m often in the “executive” position in this scenario and this barrier between the angry team/customer/partner and the people doing engineering work really pays in spades. The people doing the “real” work on both sides usually avoid animosity and the management teams slugging it out in conference rooms usually understand that the dance they’re doing is just business as usual and not personal. When the separation is violated you can have engineers doing shoddy work because they’re stressed or emotionally overloaded. Early in my career I was in that situation and made some very pointed comments that the company’s CEO had to smooth over.
If you do a really good job at handling the communication separation the business relationship is stronger after and each side better understands one another’s needs and motivations. My foot in mouth moment ended up turning into a larger business arrangement because the CEO turned it into a positive experience.
While not a universally perfect negotiating book, I’ve found “Never Split the Difference” to be an interesting tome on making the best of adversarial business situations.
> I understand that Microsoft has a similar crew they can dispatch to any customer to get their business software working again.
Yikes well I work for a large corporation that uses tons of Microsoft software, and we use their dispatch team constantly. Granted, we are probably one of their largest customers. It's great to have such a resource. But the fact that we need it doesn't speak well for Microsoft -- I would prefer if we didn't need such a dispatch team on a constant basis.
What, that they are used to failures, expect them, and live with them?
Before Microsoft, computers crashing was not considered an ordinary, everyday occurrence. I still recall my shock, back in the '90s, when I remarked to a Windows user that Unix didn't crash all the time, and he remarked that he went months without reinstalling. I learned that "crash" had been redefined!
Microsoft really needs that emergency crew. What says more is that most people who call them don't need to call other crews.
Many people who worked on UNIX for years had plenty of experience with the kernel dumping core. I ran LINUX in the mid-90s and it wasn't extremely stable.
I ran Linux, too, starting from Slackware on a CD, graduating to Debian.
I don't know about your experience, but in my circles there was real tension between upgrading to a current kernel release, vs. maintaining your 180+ days uptime. I "apt dist-upgrade"-ed for well over a decade without a failure, through a half-dozen generations of host hardware.
Only during the period when the i915 display driver was still buggy did I ever have failures. Even then, I could SSH in.
So, compared to needing to reboot twice a day (common) or twice a week (lucky), and never once needing to reinstall, yes, it was extremely stable.
Well put. I think that with Microsoft products (at least for us) it's assumed that we will experience crashes, bugs, data loss, etc. At work we are all Microsoft (bringing in your own hardware is not permitted anyway). At home, I'm mostly macOS and Linux. While those aren't perfect either, I do not expect issues, whereas with Microsoft products I've simply learned to expect them.
Ah, that was back when AA and Alaska were much closer partners, before the Virgin acquisition... I was surprised when reading the article that Alaska was so helpful.
It just seems like a very bad idea that twin-engine planes can fly so far from an air strip. If the #1 engine had failed as well it would have been game over. There's no possibility of gliding a 787 for 2+ hours and hundreds of miles.
If the FAA wanted to prioritize safety, it would still require the use of four-engined planes, as it used to for most long ocean routes. The desire to fly twin-engine planes over the ocean is entirely driven by a desire to maximize airline profits.
Admittedly, it does appear that modern twin-engine planes are reliable enough that it's not entirely crazy. But it would only take a couple of fatal engine failures to make it seem really dumb in retrospect.
People are weirdly dogmatic around this ETOPs rule change by the FAA. There is almost no one questioning it and yet the entire motivation is purely monetary. The FAA and airlines continue to push the limits further and further.
> If the FAA wanted to prioritize safety, it would still require the use of four-engined planes, as it used to for most long ocean routes. The desire to fly twin-engine planes over the ocean is entirely driven by a desire to maximize airline profits.
That intuitively makes sense, but it's incorrect. The FAA certified twin engines over water because it's safer. Half the number of engines mean half the failures, and half the risk of cascaded failures from the failing engines.
Can you point to the statistics? I'm sure modern twin-engine planes are more reliable than very old four engine planes but what about modern vs modern?
Contrary to your assertion the two engined craft are just as safe (or safer!) as the four engined craft because of changes in procedures. Fuel management, weather forecasting, general engine reliability, lubricant reserves are all different and much more stringent for a twin engined jet over water on a straightline route. The effect is the aircraft is less long in the air anyway which has a big effect on the risk calculation.
The main motivation is money, that's true, but the secondary motivation, the environment is also important and the math really does work out to a negligible safety difference (advantage twins) that to date has not led to the observation of numbers that would indicate a deviation from the predicted reliability figures.
Finally, the chances of something going wrong on a twin engined aircraft vs a quad are higher for the quad because it is a much more complex system. So yes, if an engine fails a four engined plane would be able to deal with it better but the chances of something going wrong are twice as high.
In the 60's, when the 747 was designed the reliability of jet engines was such that four engines was more or less a must but we are now a good 50 years away from those days and our ability to deal with complex reliability issues has gone up substantially (recent Boeing issues notwithstanding). The A380 has four engines because it is simply too heavy to take off with only two engines.
Engine shutdown is so rare now that pilots can go a whole career without encountering it even once and typically it is the monitoring system that has a fault rather than the engine itself but you would shut down the engine anyway in those situations as a precaution.
Doesn't the fact that the twin-engine planes have to submit to more stringent ETOPS requirements mean the FAA believes they're less reliable than four engine planes?
2 engines of the type that they put on 4 engine planes are less reliable than 2 ETOPS-certified engines. ETOPS-certified engines (actually engine, airframe, airline combination) are going to be more expensive than engines where you have three extras next to them.
I could build a jet engine in my garage and the FAA wouldn't let me fly 270 minutes away from an airport with paying passengers on it just because I made four of them. Certification is always going to be important.
I'm genuinely baffled at how you're going back and forth between authoritatively talking about how ETOPS is definitely scary, unsafe and new, but you also clearly know nothing about it.
Why not research a thing BEFORE deciding you have a strong opinion about it?
The only thing that a 3rd+ engine helps with in this context is uncorrelated engine failures. (Correlated ones - like "oops we used the wrong fuel units" or "that volcanic ash cloud sure is pretty" - are the same for two engines as they are for 4)
These failures are really, really rare. A very conservative approximation would be one in 100,000 flights. (That would be once every other day in the US, for reference. Like I said, conservative) That means you'll have both engines fail randomly every 100,000,000,000 flights, which frankly no one cares about.
Carrying around an extra engine for the 1 in 100+ Billion situation it'll be useful isn't a good idea. It'll probably kill more people than it saves, for that matter - how many extra compressor disks will be thrown into cabins because of that?
Except this ignores that the motivation was not increased safety but money. It does seem true that twin-engine planes can be quite safe but if Boeing/Airbus were motivated to create the safest possible plane, it would probably have four engines.
I doubt the US President will be flying on a twin-engine plane any time soon. They'll choose the safest (American made) option. Probably an updated 747 model, no?
And my point was that motivation is irrelevant, and I would find it quite plausible that a two engined airliner would be safer than a four engined jet. Two fewer things to explode, after all.
The president flies a 747 for size and prestige more than safety. Safest option would be to recommission an Iowa and use it as an armed ocean liner or something and skip planes entirely. Or just to stay home.
If we're talking about a command center, "stay at home" is not safe at all. Even Google Maps knows the coordinates and elevation for 2600 Pennsylvania Avenue (or Cheyenne Mountain, or Area 51, or whatever). Hence, Air Force One.
If you must allow for the failure of one engine, adding more engines reduces weight.
2 engines: You need to install and carry 200% of the engine power needed to fly the plane.
3 engines: You need to install and carry 150% of the engine power needed to fly the plane.
4 engines: You need to install and carry 133% of the engine power needed to fly the plane.
It is really quite interesting that twin-engine planes are cheaper to operate than planes with more engines. The engines in twin-engine planes should be larger and thus more expensive in every way. It seems that larger engines must be discounted somehow, either by the manufacturer or by the maintenance crews, or that there is a scaling factor that hugely effects efficiency of large passenger jet engines.
For example, are maintenance costs dominated by paperwork? That could be enough to overcome the extra expense of needing powerful equipment to lift and otherwise manipulate the parts of a huge engine.
Flight with inoperative engine(s) is altitude constrained. The aircraft is going to be able to fly with one engine operative, but not at its usual altitude, so the 200/150/133 idea doesn’t really hold.
Further, larger engines are more efficient than smaller ones. You pretty much want to install the largest engines you can fit. It’s the underlying reason for the 737 Max debacle.
Engines are sized for failure at take-off. At that time they are at maximum power, the aircraft is heavy with fuel, and the ground is mighty close.
I see no evidence that larger engines are more efficient than smaller ones. Larger total frontal area (counting all engines together) is more efficient, as is a higher bypass ratio. Both of those tend to lead toward larger engines, but you could leave those unchanged while modifying the number of engines.
For example, switching from 2 engines to 8 engines, you could maintain the same frontal area by changing the diameter from 10 feet to 5 feet. The bypass ratio, which is the portion of air that bypasses the combustion, could be 12-to-1 or 10-to-1 or whatever, and need not change with engine diameter.
It just seems like a very bad idea that twin-engine planes can fly so far from an air strip. If the #1 engine had failed as well it would have been game over. There's no possibility of gliding a 787 for 2+ hours and hundreds of miles.
You're right, and that's why 787s with Rolls Royce engines had their ETOPS certification reduced from 330 minutes to 140 or 180 depending on which version of the engine the frame has.
ETOPS seems to have done pretty well. As far as I know, no ETOPS-certified twinjets have been lost due to both engines failing. There are a couple cases of the jet running out of fuel (the famous Gimli glider and Air Transat Flight 236), but that is going to be bad no matter how many engines you have. There are cases of airplanes flying into volcanic ash clouds and losing all engines; but more engines doesn't help you if the air around the plane kills engines. There are some poorly-engineered planes with 3 engines that have had a single-engine failure bring down the entire plane (United Airlines Flight 232).
ETOPS is not just some rubber stamp for a particular model of airplane that manufacturers self-certify (hello, 737 MAX debacle), but rather a process applied to (airframe, engine, airline). You have to service particular engines to particular standards to be allowed to fly ETOPS, and it depends on the airline. I could go to the store, buy a 777 and hire 4 ATPs and fly a 777... but I wouldn't be allowed to fly it ETOPS, for example.
All in all, the program seems massively successful to me. It saves fuel, which means cheaper flights and less CO2 being generated. That's a good thing. The main downside seems to be medical emergencies; I remember some stories about the aircraft that flew EWR-SIN... it has some special corpse compartments to stash away the inevitable deaths that occurred 9 hours away from an airport. (It had 4 engines, but engines don't perform heart surgery on passengers.)
The reality is that engines are pretty reliable. 2 is the right number.
Thanks for the thoughtful replies, all. I still don't buy the idea that this change was made with public safety as the top priority. I do get that it might be a reasonable trade off of safety/profits. I really do hope the ETOPS rule changes turn out to be a good choice over the long term.
The safest way to avoid aviation incidents is to not have planes at all. From there, there is a continuum of how much risk you want to take on.
If we add many safety bells and whistles to planes, it would mean nobody could afford flying. If people couldn't afford it, they'd use other transportation methods. Those methods might be more dangerous than flying. So it wouldn't actually increase the safety of travellers. Oceanliners and cars are far from 100% safe, for example.
ETOPS-like rules have been in use since late 70's. It is an evolving standard with different craft types being approved for different ETOPS. While some current frames are rated ETOPS 330 or 370, this type of operation began officially with planes allowed to do only 90-minute ETOPS.
If flying commercial over oceans, it is either ETOPS, A380, or a current type of 747 (747-8).
Volcanic ash is a completely different beast from normal ops: you could have four engines and it still wouldn't be enough, prompting what was perhaps the most British announcement in the history of aviation, as narrated here: https://everything2.com/title/The+most+engine+failures+in+on...
If we are concerned about loss of life resulting from air travel, the main issue is co2 emissions. We should drastically refuce especially long distance air travel.
I dunno, man; I think it is deeply weird how we put so much effort in to airline safety, but let anyone drive essentially anything on the road, without even requiring more than homeopathic liability insurance, and only the most cursory of skill tests. (In California, it's totally legal to drive with $35K in liability insurance; and not all of that needs to cover personal injury!)
I personally think that any additional safety effort ought to be put into making cars safer, and not just safer for the occupants, but safer for the poor SOBs who they run into. I mean, sure, I'm not saying we should decrease airplane regulation (except maybe in the security theatre bits) but I think there's a lot more to be gained, safety wise, by regulating cars more than by regulating airplanes more.
I was wondering why didn't the crew elect to divert directly to Anchorage, reading the event description http://avherald.com/h?article=49f44548 it seems they were 2h from CDB and ANC would be another hour from there. Not sure what's the ETOPS rating of that aircraft but it might not have been 180min (though even longer times are common now)
Not necessarily the nearest if you have a couple of airports at approximately the same distance, but in this situation I guess it makes sense to land ASAP and CDB is ok.
Some emergency situations will have the plane fly back to its origin even if there are closer airports (source: have been in one), some others will have you land at the closest airport period even if might not be 100% suitable.
You can rarely be sure the failure wasn't something also experienced by the other engine.
Wasn't long ago a 747 flying over the North pole had all four engines fail simultaneously. Fortunately, conditions at 20,000 ft were better, and they got them restarted.
GE actually managed to figure out what went wrong and made sure it couldn't happen again. Makes me think they sort of knew it could happen, but the conditions seemed too unlikely.
No sane pilot would fly an extra hour in a twin with a failed engine if it's not necessary for safety (e.g. weather and runway length are considerations, the rest isn't really important in case of an engine failure)
The plane doesn't just fly nicely with one engine, it will yaw and become much less stable. You will also usually be descending (drift down procedure) because the single engine service ceiling is lower than normal cruise. And the autopilot doesn't work so you're flying manually, for all of the diversion.
You really don't want to be doing that any longer than necessary. You have also no redundancy left, so continuing means you're increasing risks. Even more so because you'll increase your remaining engine to max continuous power stressing it more than usual.
You know, behind these on-the-surface feel-good / oh-that's-cool stories is generally a less positive tale of deferred maintenance and poor choices by AA (and other airlines) that leads to this kind of rescue flight being necessary.
The article was from 2016, and the question you want to be asking is, "how often should a 2 year old 787 be having engine issues requiring unplanned diversion?" and is AA's maintenance regime causing them to encounter these situations more than is expected?
What you will generally find is that because of labor costs in the US, and the thin maintenance margins that our carriers are incentivized to follow (partly also because penalties for stranding passengers is quite low), these kinds of diversions are more frequent than other airlines operating better-maintained long-haul routes.
Things are always breaking on airplanes. How much proactive maintenance is conducted is up to the airline, and determines how much builds up before 1 out of many issues on the minimum equipment list rises enough to ground the aircraft. It's quite an active decision for an airline, actually. In this case, AA maintenance probably made a decision (under all the other constraints they face) to fly the 787 to Shanghai (where they don't have a full maintenance depot) with some marginally performing or slightly-overdue-for-recommended-replacement engine part. And then on the return the strategy backfired.
Consider that when you wonder, "is it just me, or why does airline X seem to have so many more delays and aircraft swaps than others?"
Nope. People in maintenance departments don't generally write blogs about this, and it's not like an airline is going to help publicize their issues. And judging by how even my post is downvoted, they're not likely to either.
I like this thing people are doing where they're like, "huh, my post on Hacker News was downvoted? must not be for content, must be because, um...its DEFINITELY because airlines arent going to publish negative things about them, theres definitely a logical connection there!
I found it interesting that a town of 100 had a runway capable of landing a 787. Was it built specifically for these kinds of scenarios, i.e. as an earliest diversion point for trans pacific flights?
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[ 7.9 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadAlso: on the first page, second paragraph of the special coverage, what does "Check Airman" mean?
One story that stands out is he asked a local worker to warm up the APU. The worker proceeded to build a fire under the APU, destroying it. What he meant was start it up and let it run until it reaches operating temperature.
How cold should it be before you use it? Ask the internet:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/globe-drive/culture/comm...
Most cars do start though. It’s really a maintenance issue, where it’s bad for your car to start it at -30 (as the linked article says). In my experience, a newer car in decent shape will start consistently.
Block heaters are a must in that environment.
In addition to less engine wear, it also works wonders for fuel consumption and makes the car comfortably warm in a couple of minutes.
Electric cars have the standard advice to leave them plugged in overnight in cold areas.
I had to use a block heater (and battery heater) a number of times. But once I moved to a late 80’s car, I almost never had to use the block heater.
And yes, some airplane engines use gas but the majority of them runs something that in constituency is closer to regular diesel than to gas.
Kersone is #1 diesel!
AV gas is another matter entirely but I'm not aware of any jet that would use it, though that might be a fun thing, and given that turbines can run on almost anything combustible it will probably work to some extent but I don't think it will be a happy ending unless the engine is really designed for it.
Btw, this is an interesting start-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESdHyNtHpqs not cold weather but I'd hate to fly that in any conditions.
Still, I imagine that was a "light fire, move away" procedure!
Sure, small ones with piston engines. Sure. Most anything running a turbine uses Jet-A which is closer to kerosene / diesel than gasoline.
If you're leaking fuel you've got bigger problems than how to safely heat up the engine.
(There were some, late in the war, but only just. Otherwise, all aircraft were piston-driven, running avgas, a/k/a petrol / gasoline.)
Afterburner light-ups were limited by the availability of TEB aboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylborane
Hydrazine + nitrous oxide could be fine though, but better check first before use. ;-)
The WWII Liberty Ships utilised a triple-expansion steam engine, fired by bunker fuel. Both the expended steam and the boilers were used to fluidise the fuel to flowable tempertures -- the steam circulating either through or around the feed tanks, and the fuel line itself passing through the boiler and flame trench before final injection.
There are two remaining Liberty Ships in the US -- the John W. Brown in Baltimore, and the Jeremiah O'Brien in San Francisco.
Pay a visit and one of the engine-room crew can tell you the details.
The generaly kluginess and hackiness of the design instantly brought to mind what many software projects I've worked on might look like if physically instantiated. Though the Liberty Ship design is by far the more robust and useful than most.
The engine and gear oil would freeze solid. Required fires under differentials, oil pans, etc. just to get the oil liquid again.
They stripped everything off the airplane they could. Seats, interiors, galleys, everything. They put in just enough fuel to hop over the trees to Heathrow. He said they did it, but barely.
The interesting thing is that „the end of the runway“ is actually a major river.
And a Vuelling flight almost made the same mistake two years ago (but today it would be less critical as they have extended the runway to accommodate A380s some time ago).
How did you find it?
The engine sump was incredibly heavy; when inquiring as to why, I was told the idea was that you could light a (small!) fire under it to make it easier to get the engine cranking in severe cold.
That's Soviet engineering for you!
* ETOPS: Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards; jokingly referred to as "Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim"
They check out other pilots and write procedures.
Airframe manufacturers like Airbus and Boeing have similar teams (AOG – Aircraft on Ground). The logistics and skills are just staggering. Delta dented a 757 pretty hard in Azores last year and had it patched up and back in the US pretty darn quickly. Stuff like this is exactly why neither the Russians nor Chinese are any threat to the Airbus/Boeing hegemony.
https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1429525
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7504393/American-ai...
Naturally, they were the best mechanics Boeing had.
An airplane makes money only when it is flying. When it is sitting on the ground, it loses money at a prodigious rate. A large focus of the engineering on the 757 I worked on was to keep that airplane flying as much as possible.
I understand that Microsoft has a similar crew they can dispatch to any customer to get their business software working again. This is how Microsoft is able to successfully compete against free software.
The word "payload" is not a misnomer :-)
It really is a great systems thinking story. Set the overall context and goal and then figure out how to optimize for the thing that drives results.
Kelleher (a lawyer by training) ran a private practice while litigating a 3-year lawsuit against airline incumbents at the time... before Southwest flew its first flight in Texas.
And when asked "Why?" As in, why didn't you stop, return to law, or do something easier, he basically said "Because it didn't seem fair. Or right. That they could keep us from flying."
I'm sure he had his fair share of sharp business decisions, but he came across as a truly great human being.
[0] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i...
The highest revenue per hour route is JFK to Heathrow at $24,639 [1]. A 787-800 costs about $8000/hr [2]. So that's about $277/min of revenue. Yeah, $125/min sounds about right for an average route.
[1] https://www.planestats.com/bhsw_2014sep
[2] https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1398091
My understanding is that very few airlines outright own their planes.
For example, conventional wisdom is that owning your own home outright is a Good Thing. But if mortgage interest rates are low, taking out a mortgage and investing in something that pays more than that interest rate is a Better Thing.
Yes, but there's extra risk that way. That strategy depends on either the investment returning enough every month to pay the mortgage for that month, or another funding source (like a salary) being available every month to do so. If for some reason neither are available on a given month, you risk losing your home.
But speaking globally, I would say you’re likely right. The majority of airlines are very heavily leveraged and as soon as the economy softens we’ll see at least a few casualties again.
Given how much Microsoft software tends to “blue screen of death” it’s no wonder they have to keep a crew on standby.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Worlds+Toughest+Fixes+S01+E0...
I know people who do this kind of work, but are they really the best? - As long you hold a screwdriver in your hand, you are No.2 in salary. - Family, your child has birthday, something to show you in school or sport? Forget it, 5 minutes before it starts, you get always a call. So you have no family (anymore). - 9 to 5 nah.. more like 9 plus 5 hours to work a day. - Friends, forget it you don't have any. But of course they have storys to tell. But why would you choose a such life?
And one of the more difficult things when you're that sort of person is finding a rewarding challenge up to your skills.
Or as a president once quipped, "Why does Rice play Texas?"
Because it is hard.
There is a saying that these teams are dispatched by private jet and consist of 8 executives and 2 engineers.
If you do a really good job at handling the communication separation the business relationship is stronger after and each side better understands one another’s needs and motivations. My foot in mouth moment ended up turning into a larger business arrangement because the CEO turned it into a positive experience.
While not a universally perfect negotiating book, I’ve found “Never Split the Difference” to be an interesting tome on making the best of adversarial business situations.
The fact that much of what we say, especially in times of stress, isn't what we really care about is easy to miss in actual practice.
Yikes well I work for a large corporation that uses tons of Microsoft software, and we use their dispatch team constantly. Granted, we are probably one of their largest customers. It's great to have such a resource. But the fact that we need it doesn't speak well for Microsoft -- I would prefer if we didn't need such a dispatch team on a constant basis.
Before Microsoft, computers crashing was not considered an ordinary, everyday occurrence. I still recall my shock, back in the '90s, when I remarked to a Windows user that Unix didn't crash all the time, and he remarked that he went months without reinstalling. I learned that "crash" had been redefined!
Microsoft really needs that emergency crew. What says more is that most people who call them don't need to call other crews.
I don't know about your experience, but in my circles there was real tension between upgrading to a current kernel release, vs. maintaining your 180+ days uptime. I "apt dist-upgrade"-ed for well over a decade without a failure, through a half-dozen generations of host hardware.
Only during the period when the i915 display driver was still buggy did I ever have failures. Even then, I could SSH in.
So, compared to needing to reboot twice a day (common) or twice a week (lucky), and never once needing to reinstall, yes, it was extremely stable.
https://thepointsguy.com/2017/12/last-call-alaska-american-a...
If the FAA wanted to prioritize safety, it would still require the use of four-engined planes, as it used to for most long ocean routes. The desire to fly twin-engine planes over the ocean is entirely driven by a desire to maximize airline profits.
Admittedly, it does appear that modern twin-engine planes are reliable enough that it's not entirely crazy. But it would only take a couple of fatal engine failures to make it seem really dumb in retrospect.
People are weirdly dogmatic around this ETOPs rule change by the FAA. There is almost no one questioning it and yet the entire motivation is purely monetary. The FAA and airlines continue to push the limits further and further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
That intuitively makes sense, but it's incorrect. The FAA certified twin engines over water because it's safer. Half the number of engines mean half the failures, and half the risk of cascaded failures from the failing engines.
Statistics bear this out. Twin engines are safer.
You'll probably have to do some processing, but the answer should be in there!
The main motivation is money, that's true, but the secondary motivation, the environment is also important and the math really does work out to a negligible safety difference (advantage twins) that to date has not led to the observation of numbers that would indicate a deviation from the predicted reliability figures.
Finally, the chances of something going wrong on a twin engined aircraft vs a quad are higher for the quad because it is a much more complex system. So yes, if an engine fails a four engined plane would be able to deal with it better but the chances of something going wrong are twice as high.
In the 60's, when the 747 was designed the reliability of jet engines was such that four engines was more or less a must but we are now a good 50 years away from those days and our ability to deal with complex reliability issues has gone up substantially (recent Boeing issues notwithstanding). The A380 has four engines because it is simply too heavy to take off with only two engines.
Engine shutdown is so rare now that pilots can go a whole career without encountering it even once and typically it is the monitoring system that has a fault rather than the engine itself but you would shut down the engine anyway in those situations as a precaution.
I could build a jet engine in my garage and the FAA wouldn't let me fly 270 minutes away from an airport with paying passengers on it just because I made four of them. Certification is always going to be important.
Why not research a thing BEFORE deciding you have a strong opinion about it?
These failures are really, really rare. A very conservative approximation would be one in 100,000 flights. (That would be once every other day in the US, for reference. Like I said, conservative) That means you'll have both engines fail randomly every 100,000,000,000 flights, which frankly no one cares about.
Carrying around an extra engine for the 1 in 100+ Billion situation it'll be useful isn't a good idea. It'll probably kill more people than it saves, for that matter - how many extra compressor disks will be thrown into cabins because of that?
I doubt the US President will be flying on a twin-engine plane any time soon. They'll choose the safest (American made) option. Probably an updated 747 model, no?
The president flies a 747 for size and prestige more than safety. Safest option would be to recommission an Iowa and use it as an armed ocean liner or something and skip planes entirely. Or just to stay home.
They also fly on Marine One (helicopter) which is probably less safe overall than any modern airliner.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-32
2 engines: You need to install and carry 200% of the engine power needed to fly the plane.
3 engines: You need to install and carry 150% of the engine power needed to fly the plane.
4 engines: You need to install and carry 133% of the engine power needed to fly the plane.
It is really quite interesting that twin-engine planes are cheaper to operate than planes with more engines. The engines in twin-engine planes should be larger and thus more expensive in every way. It seems that larger engines must be discounted somehow, either by the manufacturer or by the maintenance crews, or that there is a scaling factor that hugely effects efficiency of large passenger jet engines.
For example, are maintenance costs dominated by paperwork? That could be enough to overcome the extra expense of needing powerful equipment to lift and otherwise manipulate the parts of a huge engine.
Further, larger engines are more efficient than smaller ones. You pretty much want to install the largest engines you can fit. It’s the underlying reason for the 737 Max debacle.
I see no evidence that larger engines are more efficient than smaller ones. Larger total frontal area (counting all engines together) is more efficient, as is a higher bypass ratio. Both of those tend to lead toward larger engines, but you could leave those unchanged while modifying the number of engines.
For example, switching from 2 engines to 8 engines, you could maintain the same frontal area by changing the diameter from 10 feet to 5 feet. The bypass ratio, which is the portion of air that bypasses the combustion, could be 12-to-1 or 10-to-1 or whatever, and need not change with engine diameter.
You're right, and that's why 787s with Rolls Royce engines had their ETOPS certification reduced from 330 minutes to 140 or 180 depending on which version of the engine the frame has.
ETOPS is not just some rubber stamp for a particular model of airplane that manufacturers self-certify (hello, 737 MAX debacle), but rather a process applied to (airframe, engine, airline). You have to service particular engines to particular standards to be allowed to fly ETOPS, and it depends on the airline. I could go to the store, buy a 777 and hire 4 ATPs and fly a 777... but I wouldn't be allowed to fly it ETOPS, for example.
All in all, the program seems massively successful to me. It saves fuel, which means cheaper flights and less CO2 being generated. That's a good thing. The main downside seems to be medical emergencies; I remember some stories about the aircraft that flew EWR-SIN... it has some special corpse compartments to stash away the inevitable deaths that occurred 9 hours away from an airport. (It had 4 engines, but engines don't perform heart surgery on passengers.)
The reality is that engines are pretty reliable. 2 is the right number.
If we add many safety bells and whistles to planes, it would mean nobody could afford flying. If people couldn't afford it, they'd use other transportation methods. Those methods might be more dangerous than flying. So it wouldn't actually increase the safety of travellers. Oceanliners and cars are far from 100% safe, for example.
If flying commercial over oceans, it is either ETOPS, A380, or a current type of 747 (747-8).
I personally think that any additional safety effort ought to be put into making cars safer, and not just safer for the occupants, but safer for the poor SOBs who they run into. I mean, sure, I'm not saying we should decrease airplane regulation (except maybe in the security theatre bits) but I think there's a lot more to be gained, safety wise, by regulating cars more than by regulating airplanes more.
Small Planes Over Big Oceans (ETOPS Explained) (2017) [video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSxSgbNQi-g
Some emergency situations will have the plane fly back to its origin even if there are closer airports (source: have been in one), some others will have you land at the closest airport period even if might not be 100% suitable.
Wasn't long ago a 747 flying over the North pole had all four engines fail simultaneously. Fortunately, conditions at 20,000 ft were better, and they got them restarted.
GE actually managed to figure out what went wrong and made sure it couldn't happen again. Makes me think they sort of knew it could happen, but the conditions seemed too unlikely.
The plane doesn't just fly nicely with one engine, it will yaw and become much less stable. You will also usually be descending (drift down procedure) because the single engine service ceiling is lower than normal cruise. And the autopilot doesn't work so you're flying manually, for all of the diversion.
You really don't want to be doing that any longer than necessary. You have also no redundancy left, so continuing means you're increasing risks. Even more so because you'll increase your remaining engine to max continuous power stressing it more than usual.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Long-Way-Home-Revised-ebook/dp/B0...
The article was from 2016, and the question you want to be asking is, "how often should a 2 year old 787 be having engine issues requiring unplanned diversion?" and is AA's maintenance regime causing them to encounter these situations more than is expected?
What you will generally find is that because of labor costs in the US, and the thin maintenance margins that our carriers are incentivized to follow (partly also because penalties for stranding passengers is quite low), these kinds of diversions are more frequent than other airlines operating better-maintained long-haul routes.
Things are always breaking on airplanes. How much proactive maintenance is conducted is up to the airline, and determines how much builds up before 1 out of many issues on the minimum equipment list rises enough to ground the aircraft. It's quite an active decision for an airline, actually. In this case, AA maintenance probably made a decision (under all the other constraints they face) to fly the 787 to Shanghai (where they don't have a full maintenance depot) with some marginally performing or slightly-overdue-for-recommended-replacement engine part. And then on the return the strategy backfired.
Consider that when you wonder, "is it just me, or why does airline X seem to have so many more delays and aircraft swaps than others?"
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