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DENVER – Sound roared in the sky over Broomfield on Saturday afternoon. What followed was something equally unnatural and dangerous: Small and large pieces of a huge turbine engine began to rain down on the neighborhoods below the flight path of United Airlines Flight 328.
“We looked up to the sky and saw a lot of black smoke, and things were raining down from the sky,” said Lisa Hill in Denver7, who was walking in an open space near her home. “We thought maybe birds had hit the engine and it was the little things that we saw fall, but they were actually big things, they just looked small a few miles away.”
The Boeing 777-200, bound for Honolulu, had just suffered a failure of the right engine shortly after take-off. The plane turned around and returned to Denver International Airport, landing safely. No one on board or on the ground was injured.
But what caused such a dramatic and uncontrolled engine failure? Investigators will be looking for this answer to such a rare event in the coming months. But Tom Haueter, ABC News consultant and former director of the Aviation Safety Bureau’s NTSB, has a glimpse of what they might be looking for.
“What the investigators are going to look at, put all the parts together, look at the pictures, take a look at the engine maintenance records, at the engine history, when was it made, what is its lifespan.” , how many hours are they on it, how many cycles, how many flights were there, start collecting all the information, ”Haueter told ABC News.
Shortly after the incident, photos and videos began to appear on social media. For aviation experts like Haueter, these messages offered a clue as to what might have happened.
“Looking at the photos I saw it looks like a piece of one of the fan blades, these are the big blades that you can see when you look at the motor from the outside, a piece of it is missing. ‘a fan blade, and I can’t tell from another photograph if there is another fan blade completely missing, ”Haueter said.
Engine debris fell over a large area of Broomfield, affecting homes and properties in the Northmoor and Red Leaf neighborhoods. Rooms have been seen strewn about parks, lawns and rooftops. But Haueter said one of the most important parts authorities need to find is the missing fan blade.
“The really important part to recover would be the fan blade or pieces of the fan blade. You want to have both sides of failure so you can say, “OK, here’s what happened.” Was there a gash in the blade? Was there a defect in the blade? Was there something else going on? There are a lot of pieces, but only a few pieces are really essential to the investigation, ”he said.
Video captured by a passenger aboard Flight 328 on Saturday showed the engine failure in flight before the pilots made an emergency landing. Passengers likely felt the explosion and vibration all the way back to DIA.
“Basically when something like that happens, the engine is extremely out of balance. Turbine engines are designed with all that massive rotation to be very smooth, obviously. When you lose some of that, you now have a lot of vibration. The parts start to rub together which normally don’t rub, you start to vibrate parts for the fuel system, so suddenly you can have a crack in the fuel line, ”Haueter said. “You have friction from that massive engine grinding that is still spinning and it destroys various pieces of metal as it goes. It sounds pretty dramatic, let’s be honest, but unless the engine really catches fire and a major fire occurs, it looks worse than it is.
Investigators won’t know exactly what happened until they tear up the engine. A team from the National Transportation Safety Board is heading to the area to resume the investigation, police said.
Although Haueter has said what happened on Saturday is very rare, some are not taking the chances. Japan’s Transport Ministry tasked Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways, which operate planes with the same series of engines, to ground the Boeing 777s in their fleet.
The transport ministry also refers to a “serious incident” which occurred on a Japan Airlines flight on December 4 last year where the same type of engine (Pratt & Whitney PW4000 series) was damaged.
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