Really, there are bolts holding engines on to planes that are designed to break off?
Which planes? I want to avoid them?
You’re not kidding. I mean, have you seen Donnie Darko? <shudder>
William Shatner got nothing but trouble for looking out the airplane window.
Actually, no you don’t want to avoid them. The bolts, called fuse pins, are designed to break so that a broken engine does not destroy the wing. They’ll also break in a wheels-up landing so that the engines come away to reduce the risk of a fire.
Designed to break off during an accident. They’re not designed to break off if the engines think there may be an accident shortly.
I’m assuming they work similarly to Shear Pins, which are designed to break off clean if a certain amount of force is exerted on them. Imagine a mangled engine dangling off the wing, possibly while the plane is traveling several hundred knots. Better to let the whole thing come off and leave you with a clean wing then to have that aerodynamic nightmare jagging around like a loose tooth, possibly ripping the whole wing off instead.
I’d imagine they mostly only ever come off when the plane actually hits the ground, leaving the plane with one less thing to dig into the ground in the event of a forced landing (did that happen with Chesty Sullenburger’s plane when he ditched in the Hudson?)
I read the Wikipedia article on the El Al crash and one thing really stood out to me: that aircraft “contained 282 kilograms of depleted uranium as trim weight, as did all Boeing 747s at the time”.
Is this just Wikipedia BS? If not, why on earth would they use depleted uranium? Was there a shortage of lead? WTF?
That’s correct, I’m not sure why. Presumably heavier and/or more pliable than lead.
DU is significantly denser than lead, so a given weight of it is smaller than lead. And lead isn’t exactly non-toxic either. The better replacement for DU turned out to be tungsten, but the problem with tungsten was its cost. Tungsten was and is expensive, but since DU is a waste material, it was cheaper to use.
There were only 550 or so 747s built with DU counterweights before Boeing switched to tungsten in 1981.
Here’s a letter (PDF) from Boeing explaining some of the details.
I suppose you could add that Varig flight to the list, the one where the plane went west (270 deg heading) rather than north-northeast (27 deg), until the fuel ran out and it had to ditch in the jungle (I think just one passenger survived).
The pilots did look out the window, but it sure took them a while to notice they were nowhere near where they were supposed to be (or that the sun was setting in the “wrong” direction).
Yeah but he wasn’t the captain yet. (See also other thread on putting pennies in a fortune telling machine.)
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I imagine short of something flying directly into the aircraft, everything the pilot needs to know is in the instruments. Ergo “instrument flight”.
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Don’t modern aircraft make some variation of this sound if something is wrong?
You don’t always have all the information you need from the instruments in front of you. Aircraft damage can cause the instrument feeds themselves to be lost or the symptoms of the problem may be ambiguous. There was a Dash 8 that collided with a large bird on descent into Broome, Australia. The bird took out part of the wing root including cabling for the instruments. The crew ended up shutting down a perfectly healthy engine because the engine instruments indicated that it wasn’t working.
There are certainly times when the pilots in the flight deck don’t have the full picture and part of the decision making process is to gather all of the information you can about the situation. We are trained to seek information from the cabin if we think it is necessary and the cabin crew are trained to let us know about anything unusual. The general answer to the OP is that we do look out the window. To answer why a specific pilot did not visually check the damage to their aircraft will be different for every incident.
I think watching Air Accident Investigations is probably not a good source for finding out what pilots were and weren’t doing during an accident. For one thing, there is no way to know where dead pilots looked or how much they knew about their situation unless they verbalise it for the CVR. For another, some of the accidents you cite would not have had their outcome changed if the crew knew just how un-flyable the aeroplane was before it crashed.
Just because engines fell off in flight before a crash doesn’t mean they are designed to do so. If the in-flight conditions prior to crashing are so severe that the engines separate then having those “ignition sources” removed isn’t going to make an ounce of difference to the survivability of the crash.
My eldest is now flying Richard’s old ride (Dash-8). On a flight this xmas season, a sudden oil loss caused them to shut down and feather one in flight. Since these are turboprops, the now-still propeller was glaringly obvious to the passengers, one of whom *insisted *the flight attendant inform the crew 
Their response: “Yeah, we noticed it up here too.”
He was PF, and I got a copy of the ATC tapes out of curiosity. He was pretty calm during the whole thing. The interesting part was the tower controller pressuring him to sidestep to a parallel runway because he didn’t want their broken airplane tying up his main one. Since it was an ILS to 400 in snow (single engine, no less) pullinSon declined, and told them to get a tug ready.
Wow, pullin, that’s just rude. It’s like if dinner guest were choking on a chicken bone, close to death, and another guest gives them the heimlich maneuver, and the host says,“Stop! Could you two please do this in the kitchen? I really don’t want to have to clean half-chewed chicken off my dining room rug.”
The Kegworth air crash was one where they shut down the wrong (starboard) engine, although people back in the cabin could see flames and smoke coming from the port engine.