A GA story.
Just months after getting his pilot’s license, an 18-year-old faced a scary situation while flying with his family in California.
Brock Peters was taking his family to breakfast at Riverside Municipal airport in a single-engine plane on Monday morning when he heard a pop from his engine while flying over a mountain pass, according to KTLA.
“We’re coming through the pass and I hear a ‘boom’ and then I lose all my engine power,” the teen told CBS Los Angeles on Tuesday.
I’m sure that works, but it sounds like a pain in the neck. My dad flew some BAe146s, but I bet he never had that problem. He picked them up brand new from the factory.
I don’t suppose you know what serial numbers he flew? I might have asked you that before.
The “flip flop” was definitely a pain. The worst part about it was that the APU tended to fail in hot conditions when it couldn’t handle the air conditioning load, so you’re having to do this procedure in 40ºC (104ºF) plus, with no air conditioning.
I don’t, but they might be in his logbooks. If he still has them; he’s been retired for a couple decades.
I’ll send you a PM.
Cheers. Registrations will do. There are enough spotters websites that can tell which serial number goes with which registrations.
It’s kind of an odd plane, now that I think about it. Two-engine jets have been dominating the market for large airliners for decades. Is there some reason British Aerospace went with four engines and a high wing when they were designing the 146?
The operating manual has this to say about the configuration:
Four engines are suspended from a high wing by pylons. The engines relieve the bending moment due to the wing lift. The high wing keeps the engines clear of the ground, minimising the chance of the engines ingesting ground debris or sand.
Four engines yield exceptional short-field performance. The one engine inoperative ceiling is also considerably higher than that of a twin. Four engines also give inherently larger take off handling safety margins. The aircraft may be ferried with one engine inoperative.
That’s been the slang for them since my Dad’s day. Damn they’re noisy.
Upthread when I mentioned there are lots of ways besides ingestion to hurt somebody, an air hose busting loose is one of them. Size of a firehose and ~40psi with a lot of CFMs can flail around like mad until the flow is cut off. That big metal coupling on the end can take out your face.
That’s not exclusive to the BAe-146. IME across all types I’ve flown it pretty much the same story. They’re broken a lot more in summer than in winter, despite being used the same amount. And the misery / customer service impact of APU outage in summer is much, much greater than in winter. So more failures and each one more impactful. Ouch & double ouch.
It might be a matter of having fewer spare aircraft available in summer to rotate into the schedule to enable pulling the bad APU aircraft out of the schedule for repairs. That could explain it taking longer to fix each outage. But would not explain the increase in outages.
IIRC the 146 was the first jet that was able to operate out of London City Airport, thanks to the short-field performance from its four engines. And I believe that was one of BAe’s design objectives. And I think I read somewhere that BAe was expecting more cities to build small city-center airports like LCY that would require that kind of performance.
Sounds like every airliner should have four engines, at least.
If four is good, then surely eight is better. Then, pilots will never have to deal with anything more serious than the dreaded seven-engine approach.
The dreaded seven six engine approach!
I had to look up the origin of that pic. Apparently it was for 747 development; the B-52 being the only platform that could handle the large JT9T engine as a test article.
Another view, as well as some other odd planes:
I can keep doing this as long as you can.
Cool cite/site; thanks.
The 757 that looks like it has conjoined twin mislexia lives at PHX.
Fun to see it sitting there with various things bolted to the side of its head. They used to have a Boeing 720 for that role. IIRC it was one of the last flying 720s.
The 747 with a swollen #2 engine lives at TUS. It was there last time I came through there in about October. Another fun thing to see.
I was thinking Total Recall:
I can imagine doing a double-take on these things in real life. The XL engine one especially almost looks like an optical illusion.
Returning briefly to the F-35B accident a few weeks ago, there’s new news:
They are pausing accepting deliveries of the engines to the factory and of jets to the fleet.
Not explained in that article, but available in paywalled articles I’ve read, there’s also been an urgent grounding of a few recently delivered airplanes while they try to sort out exactly what went wrong and why.
My personal reading of these decisions this early suggests they found an obviously broken part & consider the whole latest batch of that part, whatever it is, to be suspect. Some of that batch was already in the fleet, some on engines already in the airplane factory, some on engines still at the engine factory or farther upstream.
In other news from a couple weeks ago that I just encountered, we learn the pilot was examined at the hospital after the accident, found to be uninjured, and sent home. That’s pretty snazzy seat performance compared to my era. Which we thought was pretty hot stuff versus not too long before.
Probably should mention the B-36D, with “six a-turnin, four a-burnin”.
Five engined jet aircraft:
It was a cancelled project, but the only example of a five engined jet I could find.
Who said it has to be a jet? I was thinking of this:
While searching for that image, I also found this:
Don’t forget the Dornier Do X, with twelve engines.