On 9/23 a panel from the wing of a KLM Boeing 777 leaving Kansai International Airport fell off and landed in downtown Osaka, damaging a car (but luckily not injuring anyone). The cause is being investigated.
The same week, a panel from an ANA Boeing 767 (from the body just above the wing) fell off after the plane took off from Narita Airport, landing in Saitama, just north of Tokyo. Again, no injuries. In this case, it was (rather quickly, IMO) blamed on a leaking nitrogen container that is supposed to blow off the panel in the case of an emergency landing.
Is this just something that happens all the time but is attracting attention now because a piece landed in the middle of a city, or is it just a bizarre coincidence? Or is it the result of a more fundamental flaw in maintenance procedures or design/construction?
That article links to this page, which lists the following:
Incident ANA B763 near Tokyo on Sep 27th 2017, dropped panel in flight
Incident KLM B772 at Osaka on Sep 23rd 2017, dropped panel on climb out
Incident Ryanair B738 at London on Sep 15th 2017, dropped nose wheel
Accident Flybe DH8D at Manchester on Dec 14th 2016, dropped engine cowl
Incident White AT72 at Lisbon on Jul 28th 2017, dropped engine access door
Incident Delta B752 at San Juan on Jul 16th 2017, dropped access panel in flight
Incident Map AT42 near Belem on Jul 4th 2017, dropped panel in flight
Accident Koryo T204 near Pyongyang on May 25th 2017, dropped part of flaps in flight
Incident Cargologic B744 near Munich on May 19th 2017, dropped flap track fairing in flight
Incident Urumqi B738 at Zhengzhou on May 16th 2017, dropped wheel on landing
Incident Brussels A332 at Brussels on Apr 30th 2017, dropped fairing on departure
Incident Canada A333 at Montreal on Apr 16th 2017, dropped main wheel on departure
Accident Lufthansa Cargo MD11 at Buenos Aires on Nov 10th 2016, dropped left nose wheel upon touchdown
Incident Comair B734 at Johannesburg on Dec 6th 2016, dropped wheel on landing
Accident Atlas Air B744 at Miami on May 17th 2010, dropped flaps part on approach
Incident Easyjet A320 at Milan on Aug 12th 2013, engine doors torn off
Incident Centurion B744 at Miami on Nov 11th 2016, dropped engine cowl
Incident Fedex MD11 at Memphis on Oct 18th 2016, dropped part during roll out, engine damage
Report Tailwind B734 at Liege on Jul 31st 2015, dropped flap seal plate on approach
I snipped out the ones that weren’t a piece dropping off of the airplane. The dropped wheel entries may more properly be called collapsed wheels though, not sure. Maybe one of our aviation dopers who knows the industry lingo can clarify.
It could be worse. We’ve accidentally dropped nukes before. Yes, the bombs. None have exploded yet, but a few are still missing.
Actually a few nukes did detonate; only the high explosive portion, not the fission/fusion part. In the Palomares incident, two bombs detonated on impact contaminating the area with Pu-239. I vaguely remember a couple of other booms but it’s nap time.
Living a good healthy life but being killed by a falling aircraft panel is a recurring though/daydream/nightmare for me. Weird.
I had to look the Palomares incident up. Pretty shocking really and it was only last year, nearly 50 years after the accident, that the last of the contaminated earth was shipped back to America - a bit of Spain in Nevada?
Airline stuff isn’t my specialty, but the “dropped wheel” entries could be as simple as a tire that failed on takeoff or landing, leaving parts of the carcass on the runway (similar to the “rubber snakes” you can see on the side of many highways, from failed truck tires). Or it could be as drastic as the entire tire & wheel assembly departing the aircraft, due to a wheel, bearing, or axle nut failure.
I’d say bizarre coincidence. If you read through that list, you’ll see the other incidents are spread fairly widely across the globe.
Some other interesting details:
[ul]
[li]only FIVE of those entries say the item was dropped “in flight”. There’s 3 more that don’t mention when it was dropped, but all the rest fell off during landing, takeoff, or approach. [/li][li]Those occurred over a span of 2 years, [/li][li]Includes data from across the whole world[/li][/ul]
An amusing entry I found while scrolling through that site:
"British Airways B788 near Irkutsk on Aug 21st 2015, smartphone disobeys no smoking instruction"
Retreads are actually very common in commercial aviation, but they’re done much differently than truck tires, with far more rigorous QA/QC. In the US, FAA AC 145-4A provides guidance to tire manufacturers/retreaders re: retreading aircraft tires. Here’s a video from Dunlop Aircraft Tyres that explains/shows some of the process.
An aircraft on approach is still in flight. An aircraft taking off or landing is also flying once the landing gear are no longer in contact with the surface*.
This seemingly-convoluted sentence accounts for helicopters with skids, amphibious airplanes, seaplanes, and float-equipped aircraft.
At busy airports debris on the runway is a serious hazard and there is special team to inspect and clear the runway between takeoffs and landings (they need a fast car). A major air disaster was caused by aircraft debris in Paris when the wheels of an Air France Concord caught some and swept it up with such force it punctured the fuel tank. It was part of a thrust reverser that fell off another aircraft that took off a few minutes earlier.
It happens frequently enough for there to be many cites above.
But given the number of commercial airplanes in operation (100,000 per day) and the number of panels/exposed parts on a typical plane, that probably happens a vanishingly small part of one percent of the time.
From the looks of the picture, it wasn’t just a panel that was lost, it was the whole front of the engine housing on an A380 and looks like part of the fan and possibly compressors. More parts dropped off as it made an emergency landing. Bit of a different situation though as this appeared to be due to some type of severe engine malfunction.
Here’s a video of engine parts dangling in the breeze in the aftermath of whatever happened in the above incident. The engine cowling appears to be covered in oil or some type of fluid as a result of the disintegration of the front part.
I was an aircraft mechanic for over 20 years. It was very rare to have an aircraft return with anything missing. I remember only seeing 5 such instances.
Unless an aircraft reports seeing or dropping debris a runway is inspected only every few hours. There is an ongoing effort to develop a radar or lidar system to detect debris on the runway in near real time.
Exactly.
I’ve never personally known of dropping a part in my 30 years. That’s either I did it or the crew ahead of me did it and I found their hole. I’ve certainly read reports of stuff falling off. As above, it’s statistically real rare, but multiplied by the number of flights per day something like that happens somewhere on Earth every month or so.
The big difference in aviation is that everything that happens gets recorded and publicized in at least a database and website if not on CNN. Imagine what the TV news would look like if every truck that shed a “gator” resulted in a some breathless reporter standing by the roadside trying to find something non-[del]obvious[/del]vacuous to say while the camera lovingly cuts back and forth between her cleavage and the torn bit of tire lying by the roadside. It’d take far more than 24 hours just to show 1 days’ “news” from my state alone.
Yowza! As you say, it looks like the fan came unglued and shredded the forward nacelle.
At first look this is quite different from the failure that QANTAS had coming out of Singapore. Certainly very different parts of the engine came unglued / fell off. Qantas Flight 32 - Wikipedia.
The original cause of that one was a lubrication failure. A lubrication failure is also a good way to blow the front of an engine off when some bearing eventually seizes and the rotational inertia starts tearing stuff up. Makes one wonder if there’s a connection. We’ll have to check back in 18 months to see.
Yep, this was definitely not a trivial incident – one of those engine pieces ejected at high speed could have penetrated a fuel tank or otherwise caused a catastrophic disaster. The yellowish stuff all over the outside of the engine that I had speculated might be oil was, according to one report, hydraulic fluid. There was a lot of shredding going on and a lot of crap flying around. One of the passengers described it as feeling like the plane “had run into a Jeep” and suddenly banking and losing altitude.
I was listening to a recording of the transmissions with ATC, and while I’m sure the crew calmly reassured all the passengers, up front the captain had declared a “Mayday” and the airport was in full emergency response mode. It was interesting that every call from ATC to AF66 was addressed as “AF66 Mayday”, which I assume is standard protocol, but not something you hear every day. I suppose this is a useful clue to other aircraft. The only normal part was that the captain elected to proceed to parking on his own power, though he was informed that the emergency vehicles would be following. The less than normal part was that a lot of cleanup was needed on the runway because the plane dropped more engine pieces as it landed.
Hasn’t there been at least one instance of flying engine parts ripping into the cabin and killing passengers but without causing a crash? I seem to remember something like that happening.