Huh - I’ve never really thought of it. When pilots talk about “losing an engine” we are usually referring to its ceasing to function, not actually departing the aircraft.
Engines are heavy and maybe a complete absence could be enough to destabilize an airplane catastrophically. Or not. I’m not sure, and I don’t recall this ever being addressed in training. Let’s see what the other usual suspects think.
My thought is the weight loss from an engine falling off would be a major annoyance but not a crisis.
It’s what else gets damaged that causes a crisis. Loss of hydraulics, physical damage to wing or tail, etc.
That DC-10 was screwed, stall warning, etc., or no. With no slats on one side the difference in stall speeds is big: 30 or 40 knots. No way to gain the requisite speed in the time available before that wing is fully stalled. And no time / altitude to recover before the ground arrives.
There is a tradeoff in every takeoff. In the initial 1000 feet you can remain as slow as possible to maximize climb angle and rate, or you can accelerate some to improve the speed margin to stall.
In a big jet there’s typically a 20 knot span that’s within book tolerance, but there’s also a single preferred number in that range. It’s a matter of rotation and liftoff technique, plus pilot preference where one operates in that span.
My personal approach to that is/was that I’d rather be lower and faster unless immediate terrain clearance is a problem off that particular runway.
IIRC the DC10 pilot chose to climb at the min speed to maximize altitude gained. Which is fine until Fate throws a Joker on your pile. Them instead being at the top of the speed range may not have been enough to save them. But he’d have had a better fighting chance.
There was a flight that may have been saved by one of the slats falling off. Allegedly, the crew accidentally extended the flaps and slats during cruise. They retracted them again, but one slat on the right wing stuck in the extended position. The plane rolled because of the assymetric lift and drag, then dove and lost more than 30,000 feet. The pilots were only able to regain control after the slat tore off.
I checked the wikipedia page for this flight, and it says there’s some disagreement with the NTSB’s report.
The distance of the engine installation from the aircraft centerline would matter, just as it does in a V1 cut (loss of engine power just past the abort point). In jets with tail mounted engines you may barely even notice the asymmetry from a complete power loss, so I’m told and have experienced in the sim. Different with wing mounted engines.
So if a King Air engine actually fell off you’d have no more prop drag, but a lot more weight asymmetry. At low speed and factoring in the startle factor, I wouldn’t be surprised if a departing engine led directly to a crash before any ancillary effects had time to manifest.
Agree engine location matters lots. As you say, tail mounted engines have little asymmetrical thrust.
IIRC back maybe 1990ish a bizjet (Hawker?) carrying an African head of state was struck by an SA-7. One engine came off cleanly & the crew landed safely.
I’m on my phone or I’d dig up a cite.
And yeah, startle is huge. Suddenly the plane’s going apeshit, lots of buffeting & vibration, and you have a handful of seconds to do the right thing, whether by good luck or Yeagertastic skill.
Yes, it was a Hawker. In fact, I know that crew’s sim instructor. We talked about that event in class.
Italian C-27J crew puts on quite the show at RIAT. Pay the man, Shirley. A turboprop cargo plane doing non-cargo flying at the airshow. Rolls, loops, side slips and full on stop at the end.
Very nice, thanks for sharing.
Basic aviation question: how did they know those manoeuvres wouldn’t overstress the airframe? I’m thinking particularly of the loops; I know you can roll at (or close to) 1G. Is that why they were rolling out of the loops, in order to avoid overspeeding on the dive?
Ooh, it has a sunroof.
Depends on the plane. For single engine planes it would almost always be immediately uncontrollable CG position. Believe it has happened in air racing. For wing mounted engines it might not be. When my stepfather was an engine mechanic in the air force an engine he had worked on froze up and fell off the B-52 it was mounted on. It landed normally (“the dreaded seven engine approach”).
Not sure what might happen in a jet with rear mounted engines.
They were probably very light. From the wikipedia article on the C-27J that plane has a max weight of 32,500kg and an empty weight of 17,500kg. If it is good for 3g at max, the wing can handle 5.6g when empty. It is still a matter of things like the engine mount being able to handle the load, but those are usually strong enough because of the torque, gyroscopic and other loads…
Easy enough for the engineers at the factory to do all the calcs and ensure the show pilots know what speeds and loads they can stand vs. not. As well, even if C-27s don’t normally have G-meters, it’s easy to install one temporarily for a show. It’s just a mechanical device and needs no connection to external sensors or even power.
What’s the normal way for an engine to land after falling off a plane?
Never mind.
Conveniently pre-disassembled, so you can save time during the next overhaul.
There was a mid-air collision at WFJ (Lancaster, CA) yesterday. One fatality.
L.A. County Fire Department
@LACoFDPIO
AIRCRAFTs DOWN | FS117 | 47th E & Ave F | 60th E & Ave G | #Lancaster | Single Engine Cessna, Mid Air collision. | At approx. 1:20 p.m., #LACoFD units responded to 2 downed planes. 1 pilot pronounced DOA, one pilot reported no injuries.
Per the article, the single-engine Cessna was a Nanchang CJ-6 and a Yakovlev Yak-52.
“Not clear what caused the crash.”
They collided in mid-air. THAT’S what caused the crash.
That was some really bad reporting.
I’ll speculate that it was a formation flight. The Yak and the CJ-6 are very similar and I’m guessing they may have been flying together.
If you consider the mid-air collision to be the crash, that sentence makes more sense.
True, but writing “Not clear what caused the collision” was too hard?
Adding insult to injury, that passenger was charged an additional $20 for the extra protein in his meal.