These engine failures were "Contained" engine failures. Please learn the difference. What fell of was aircraft parts not made by PW. The fan blades did not penetrate the engine housing.
Me being supportive: I really like your vids. Me being helpful: for the REAL meaning of "begging the question" see "Petitio Principii" ... and ... "contained" vs "uncontained" refers to whether or not the damage fragments stayed inside the protective kevlar cylinder NOT the resulting condition or operability of the engine. What matters is that any shrapnel was contained and did not damage the rest of the plane. Ideally, this would also include shrapnel and debris retention within the engine as well, but nobody has figured out how to do that.
If a mechanic came across a cracked turbine blade, I can assure you they would not allow the engine to remain in service, and there would be no shortage of experts soon on scene. Please don’t speculate about these types of things with an inaccurate assumption. Stick to facts and your video will be more credible.
Thanks for your nice video. The PW4000 is an incredible engine, and in my opinion the problem that led to these incidents was a regulatory problem, not a problem with the engine itself at all. Had more inspections and preventative maintenance been carried out, the incidents could likely have been prevented. That we have only have a few such incidents in the PW4000-112's decades of trouble free operation proves that it is indeed an excellent design. In all cases the broken fan blades were contained, and the aircraft landed safely.
According to AeroInside, United has had three instances of PW4000 trouble this year alone, whereas they haven't had any GE90 trouble since about 2019. P&W made the least dependable engines for the 777.
technically speaking this is a contained engine failure - not a single rotating part of the compressors or the fan hit the fuselage and killed everyone on its path. The debris exists with every engine failure at least because of the metal flying out of the back of the gas turbine
The fatigue failure point on these hollow blades is not as long as they modeled for, the solution is to replace them before they reach the lower standards now established. This style of blade will be either phased out or redesigned but these older engines with the hollow blades are almost gone now. It is a serious issue and I'm sure Pratt and Whitney will do what is necessary for safety sake, they make very reliable turbine engines but GE is a much friendlier product to work with.
I was waiting for this upload from you! It didn’t disappoint! Great update and overview on what’s currently going on! It must be a massive headache again for Boeing!
Thanks so much :D I don't think Boeing will be so much negatively impacted as much as Pratt & Whitney will, but yes it'll definitely be a headache for the company to sort these issues out.
Thanks dude! What a small world it is, seems like many have flown on N772UA! It would be a shame to see UA retire these domestic birds early because of this...I do hope they fix this soon!
Is nobody talking about how often hollow fan blades spontaneously disintegrate in flight? This isn't only a P&W problem, its an industry-wide problem - this famously happened on an AirAsiaX flight on June 25, 2017 - and the China Eastern incident in December 2023 (which has gotten far less media attention, probably because this happens a bit more than you would like) marks at least the fourth time this has happened with the Trent 700. As of November 2023, the Trent 700 has accumulated over 68 million hours of service since EIS in 1995. Just compare that to the 180 million total accumulated flight hours of carbon-fiber-composite blades on all GE90 and GEnx engines since their EIS in 1995 - the same year - without a single fan blade failure! Yes, hollow fan blades are indeed quite safe, but only if the blades are properly manufactured and maintained - and that has proven to not always be the case.
For sure, it's terrifying to look at the video and see the engine in pieces like that. And yeah definitely, it's a miracle how no one was injured in this incident.
They did get hurt in this same exact accident that happened in the Netherlands, but because P&W is so rich they just sign settlements. News says only "two people" hurt from the debris in Netherlands, later you find its a baby and an 80 year old lady... If you look into this, Pratt & Whitney has issues on all of their fan blades. Literally, not just with their PW4000-112 model.
Absolutely detailed and informative video! I was happy to hear that no one got injured. This is one of the reasons why engines need to be 100% function, and properly maintained, because of such stuff like this. I was looking to try the UA 772 from MCO and ORD, PW needs to work on making sure that their engines are 100% and perfect decision before they are soldered under that wing
Thanks a lot dude, yes I agree this issue has been recently going on with the older 777's and their PW engines. Thankfully it hasn't been as big an issue as the 737 MAX but it still needs to be addressed ASAP which is why I'm glad they've grounded all PW 777's.
thats why i love the GE90s and trent 800s they are really reliable and the GE90s can allow an aircraft to use half the ruway in takeoffs so incase of emergency it can quickly slow down using the over half of runway,the RR 800s are really quite while cheap to maintain and it looks cool for its shape an size and the spiral inside looks so cool
I work at the EH plant. They are setting up for testing 100’s of blades. From what i gather is we dont make new 4000 blades. What i see coming of this is more frequent testing. I saw the JAL blades. Yet to see the UAL blades in the shop.
United’s 777-200s after all are the oldest 777s in the world so something wrong was bound to happen eventually. I’m still surprised that United’s haven’t been retired yet as they’re more than 25 years old.
engines get replaced all the time so engine time and cycles is independent of the structure. u said a ton of stuff wrong. there should be specs for fan blades.
Awesome documentary!!! Really loved this. I can say that the most dependable version of these type of engine is the PW4090. I could watch this again and again. Cool stuff!!
Amateur stuff - this was a "Contained" engine failure - the liberated parts were airframe parts not engine parts. Also any inspector or mechanic on detecting any crack would imediately ground the aircraft pending further instructions. I have 50 years in aviation maintenance on similar equipment to this so please be careful what you publish in future. This is serious stuff.
An excellent video for those of us who aren't "experts" in the field. That includes most people watching this presentation. Social skills development is a useful thing.
@AS Aviation Probably worth adding a correction caption about the definition of "contained vs uncontained" at that point in your video, but otherwise the compilation of information & editing was good. See pages 1 & 2, Section 5c. of this FAA Advisory Circular for example. www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/AC_33-5.pdf *"Contained means that no [engine] fragments are released through the engine structure, but fragments may be ejected out the engine air inlet or exhaust."* It's much too early to say for sure whether this was one or the other (it depends if the broken blades exited sideways rather than through the engine air inlet or exhaust), although I've seen at least one photo where there was damage to the underside of the aircraft body alongside the engine, but that might well be damage from the cowling peeling away. I would also have avoided suggesting there's anything strange about the two being sister planes. If they were added to the fleet at the same time on the same route, it's completely unsurprising. As expected, the various aviation authorities have taken it seriously & acted quickly to ground similar planes pending investigations.
The engine manufacturer should have regulations and procedures in place from the start to provide to the carriers in case of such incidents. But that's just my opinion. You are definitely right that the carrier has to maintain the engines, but it's hard for them to do so without any proper guidelines from the engine manufacturer.
The B777 family are the safest airplanes...ever. These large twins got rid of the B747 and A380/A340. If there is a serious problem it can be identified and fixed and it will be. If it is corrosion or wearing out somehow, they will replace these parts or whole modules and they will perform as they have done since EIS. The cost will be huge though and these airplanes were under market pressure already. Lessors (and bond portfolios) exposed to this will be not best pleased. Airlines are less affected since traffic is gone, and they will wait to see how quickly things can recover for longer haul flights. GE/etc. will be having a closer look at their engines as well...and I hope the regulators force this.
Hey AS I’m supposed to take UA 219 to HNL from ORD on the 777-200. Do you think they will be back in service by June? UA219 is currently being replaced with the 767-300ER. I’m hoping I’ll be able to fly this bird! Great video man!
Only the domestic 777's (ones with PW4077 engines) have been grounded. The other United 777-200ER's have PW4090's or GE90-94B's and are still active, same with 777-300ER's which have GE90-115B's. I have no idea to be honest, but I would assume the issue would be fixed before June. If not, then United would either keep the 767 on the HNL flight or even the 788 like what they just did with the DEN-HNL flight.
@@ASAviation Yeah I was supposed to be on a UAL domestic 777-200 (same as you) with PW4077 engines. I would either assume it would stay on the 767-300ER which they will most likely do or the 787-8 which I’m hoping. They also had used the 78X for a bit. I am hoping though that I will be on a 777-200 because they don’t have that much longer with UA and I feel very safe onboard any aircraft including a giant 777!
Yes for sure...but this time around this is more the fault of Pratt & Whitney than it is Boeing. Definitely though both companies are going to go through some headaches with this.
There's issue with A330's pw4170&4168 have microcrack in Stage 4 LPT blade outer air-sea. This issue is reported by korean air and asiana air recently and they saying their half of A330 are affected with is issue.
I think you did a great job. In response to the previous comment...about the “parts that fell off the airplane were not made by PW” makes me laugh. The fan blade or blades separating from the engine were the cause of the pieces of cowling coming off and falling to the ground where it posed a hazard. They DID find a part of one fan blade at the one o’clock position in the casing around the engine and another part of a fan blade was located at the soccer field.
It was my understanding that the PW4098 was a very troubled upgrade and I thought that PW and the customer airlines gave up on it and stuck with the PW4094 instead ?
When I heard of this incident on the news the first thing I did was to look up the aircraft registration on the net. I will say that I was quite surprised, as in most major engine blowouts, the culprit is GE!
Excellent analysis. The common denominator appears to be Pratt and Whitney. Hopefully they can get to the root cause and fix their issues before we could end up with a catastrophe. Great airmanship on the UA pilots in getting their aircraft safely back on the ground.
Thank you so much Luis! Definitely looks to PW as the source of the problem. And yes for sure, amazing flying by those pilots in getting the aircraft back quickly and safely!
Another question to ask: Is this a result of improper manufacturing or the result of improper maintenance (or the lack of)? Those stage 1 compressor blades are supposed to be inspected (NDT or ultrasonic) at regular intervals. Are the airlines allowing accountants to make engineering decisions?
@@Jeeper1378 I contacted a fellow co-worker who retired recently. He was working as inspector on the 737 engines. I think he said they used eddy flow technology to test blades on the RR Tey engines. He didn't know the exact time or cycles that the hubs or blades were supposed to be inspected. I do remember that the #1 stage hubs on the old DC-10 engines had to be discarded after a specific number of cycles (takeoff & landing). Not repaired or inspected but scrapped. Something else that I noticed is that the Pratt engine uses hollow blades, probably for better fuel efficiency. I wonder if that is common to all high bypass engines or just the Pratt.
@@larryhutchens7593 to reduce weight because the blades are so big. I dont know if Eddy current checks inside the part. I see them use it along small vane edges.
Cool video... Note that un-contained means that the containment case was breached...this was a fan blade that broke and hit another one, and all of that went out the front. Wonder if this is by design so that mess doesn't go through the core and make a real un-contained (turbine blade/disk) failure and fire.
obviously, 'they', or rather 'we' already forgot about Habibie's 'crack progression theory' in which predict the metal fatigue in aviation. Although the original paper was about the metal fatigue of both 'engine craddle-wing connection' and 'wing-fuselage connection', i see no reason that such theory can't be re-researched for turbofan engine blades. May the safety become primary drive for any aviation invention
United’s 777-200 non-ER’s currently do not have IFE even though they’re used on flights as long as 9hrs long which is a huge shame. Luckily they’re refurbishing them again to have IFE screens, N222UA being the latest example.
PW's relationship with Boeing and United is no more. Boeing never asked PW to make engines for newer Boeing aircraft like the 787, 737MAX, and 77W because GE has recently proven to make much better engines. As for United, PW has also fallen out of favor in favor of GE after the merger with Continental Airlines. Granted, I know that there are exceptions like the KC-46 and those 3 767s that United got from Hawaiian, but those don't reflect the overall trend.
False! An uncontained engine failure means that the side of the engine case was breached by the ejection of rotating parts. In the case the fan blade broke off, was ejected out the front of the engine, then subsequently impacted the nose cowl, thus causing the rest of the engine cowling to peel off. This was a contained engine failure!
The similarities between the 3 incidents are very alarming. They did the right thing to ground all PW powered 777s, hopefully the issues will be resolved soon and we could see those 777s flying once again. The coincidence that the two UA 777s were both heading to Honolulu tho!😂
It would be a shame if UA retired these 777’s early so I hope they can get fixed up. And HNL is a common route for these birds so yeah quite the coincidence 😆
If United (or Flight 328's passengers for that matter) sue someone for the incident and subsequent headaches, hopefully they sue PW instead of Boeing and not repeat how Norwegian sued Boeing while leaving RR unscathed or how some passengers from WN1380 sued Boeing while leaving CFMI unscathed.
You would think the media would show where that engine ring really hit first, it landed pretty much dead center on a truck in the driveway and probably bounced over to the tree.
Luckily for United, in addition to their 22 new 777-300ERs, 22 of their 777-200ERs have GE engines because they were inherited from Continental. Japan Airlines is also lucky because in addition to all their flagship 777-300ERs, all of their 777-200ERs have GE engines.
@@ASAviation UA grounded 24 aircraft. The number of non-ER 777s they have is 19. Some of PMUA 777-200ERs must be part of the grounding as well as their 777-200s and those 2 types have slightly different engines.
Looks like a 747-400 flying a smaller version of the PW4000 had a similar issue with a destroyed engine and parts falling out of the sky and injuring people in the Netherlands.
Yes, that's correct. VQ-BWT Longtail Aviation 747-400 had the engine failure. It had the PW4056 engines if I'm not wrong and it was also quite an older plane at 31 years old.
The engine was shut down. The fan blades will continue to "windmill" though, as the plane was still travelling at 200+ knots. All of that wind passing over the blades makes them spin.
By far the most detailed video that I’ve seen ob RU-vid regarding this incident! Great job mate I can imagine how long this took you to make and hope this will turn out as another viral video!
Your definitions of contained and Uncontaind are wrong and so is the media's definition. An uncontained failure is when, typically a blade, fails and departs through the engine case or containment ring. The fan containment ring on this engine did not fail. As debris from the failure is processed by the engine other sections start to experience secondary damage (cowling, fuel lines, oil lines, HP section, etc). The fan blade apparently, to be determined, failed forward due to the large aero load on a large blade. Are PW engines reliable. Look at the perhaps millions of operating hours across this model of engine and you are going to say 3 failures deem this series of engines unreliable, not fair. Is this dramatic yes. Do they need to do more analysis on these blades, reduce the life limit on these blades and work on an improved blade, yes. Every spinning part on the engine potentially experiences fatigue and cracking. You manage those parts and remove them before failure. Sometimes you get it wrong. There are life monitoring programs to inspect these parts using many different non-destructive techniques. Also a part may be cracked and you don't know it. Thats why you have eddy current, unltrasonic and X-ray testing/inspecction programs to monitor these parts. Fatigue cracks in blades can rarely be found using a white light, 10x magnification inspection. By the way I have no affiliation with PW but have investigated other type, model, series PW engine failures. Also drop the conspiracies. The destinations and sister aircraft are coincidences. And airframe and engine times have no correlation. They are separate tracked items. Good luck in your aviation pursuits. Its an exciting field.
WIll never take United again... I was suppose to be on the Denver to HNL flight and we changed it from YYZ to IAH and then to HNL.. It sucks that it's part of the Star Alliance.
Oh wow...were you supposed to be on the exact DEN-HNL flight that had the failure? That’s insane. I personally love United haha, but that’s because I’ve grown up flying them.
Relax Inspection intervals will be increased now. These engines have been on the wings for over 20 years...and not many failures at all FYI: EVERY ENGINE MANUFACTURER has had blade offs on the 777. Many airworthiness directives have been issued Rolls Royce has had the most Then GE Maybe you shouldn’t fly. 😂😂😂😂😂
The cowling was probably torn off by the intense vibration when the missing blades threw the fan off balance. The vibration at the time it failed will have been far more sever than what we see in the video since we only see the fan windmilling rather than running. While it was running at near full power it would be spinning at least ten times as fast. It is not surprising that the cowling came off i such a situation.
Thanks mate! Yeah but that won’t matter much since I don’t think any British carrier (other than Norwegian who leased a Privilege Style 777 with PW’s) operate the PW engines on their 777’s.
Great video! Thats nuts that the same plane was used with all those similarities! Can you imagine a ten foot tall 777 engine cowling falling in your front yard! :D Insane! What's even more insane is that there were 2 unconfined failures in the same day! This was the first place I heard about the groundings and you explained it excellently! Really good video
It's truly crazy to believe it! That engine inlet falling in front of the house was really something straight from a movie. Thanks for the nice comment dude!
