Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Jet engine explosion.

The folks on the ground were as lucky as the folks in the air. Reminds me of driving up a long hill near Oxford years ago and coming up behind a truck who’s load of sheeting was being sucked up into the air like a pack of cards. I caught up with him to warn him only to have a sheet fly off and knife into the central reservation right beside me. It was sheet steel about 1/8” thick. I doubt it would have been good news if it had landed on my car.

No Morgan’s were hurt in the making of this film!

It flew over my sons house he saw the smoke coming from the engine and said it was low and not sounding very healthy which drew his attention. There were bits coming off it but nothing fell in his neighborhood. Apparently there was not enough time to dump fuel so it landed with relatively full tanks. A friend of ours who is a Captain with United Airlines told me that this is the sort of thing they practice on the simulators all the time, so to the pilots it would have been a straightforward emergency landing which is why the passengers deplaned via steps not chutes. The critical point would have been if this had happened on takeoff when you need the two engines, once up as in this case then one engine is good enough. Pugh Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub got excited though.

I should have added that the pilot of this aircraft is a good friend of the Captain I mentioned above.

I think you are right. I once asked an old friend of mine (who had been a BA pilot for 21 years) how much power was held in reserve on take-off? He replied “none”. Always wished I’d never asked after that.

I was on a BA Jumbo once departing J'burg. We were I think close to V1 when the pilot got an indicator light of a fault on an engine. We really stopped. You realise then why they tell you to fasten seat belts tightly. It was a switch fault but we lost a few hours.

Reserve power on take off. Well in this day & age a large number of take offs are done using reduced thrust. Sometimes called flex thrust. A complicated Calc., but essentially you use the aircraft weight & calculate what power you need to achieve the certified performance on the day. (You can always push the trust levers fwd to gain more power)This reduced the stress on the engine & reduces the overhaul costs. Very often if the aircraft has only been doing reduced thrust take offs engineering will ask for a full power take off to check full power is still achievable. I usually found that they wanted it when just off maintenance & on an empty ferry flight. On an A330 you had a tiger by the tail. Quite a challenge to keep it all under control. Heavyweight out of say Nairobi (hot & high) you would be at max thrust & probably getting on for 190+ mph at lift off. (32000 equivalent shaft horsepower each to give some idea why)

A bit like managing your right foot on the accelerator in different conditions. Also using higher gears to reduce torque surge on hard acceleration.

I am only an interested layman. But I can imagine that it is not good if much less is flown because of Covid. Aircraft that stand around for a long time and fly only sometimes are certainly not as safe as aircraft that fly permanently. So I'm afraid there might be a lot of things going on in the beginning when all planes are reactivated.

No wonder these engine's fail when they're made of paper and plastic.

Drifting a bit from the unfortunate but thankfully not catastrophic event, and having worked in the industry my whole career, I always enjoyed hearing my boss tell people that kg for kg an aero-engine is roughly worth its weight in solid silver, whereas the average family car is roughly worth its weight in hamburgers.