Originally Posted by
First IFE
Ah, didn't really look. Not something I would have thought to look for since this all happened at cruise altitude. Are you implying a plane above dropped "blue ice" and we just miraculously sucked it in? That's pretty remote...
No, there have been documented cases of blue ice (the result of a leaky lav dump valve) releasing and being ingested into the engine (on the same aircraft). More of a risk with aft mounted engines than with wing mounted engines, although there were a few incidents with 737 Jurassics (-100/200).
There was a rather famous event on a 727 - I'm going to say around 1970 but I could be off a few years. Anyway, blue ice ingestion cause the engine to seize - by design the engine mount failed (the loads when an engine rotor seizes at speed are tremendous, so the mount was designed to fail to prevent more serious airframe damage) and they dropped the engine into a field 30,000 ft. below.