Originally Posted by
tdracer
To be fair loma, I can remember a total of two forced landings due to bird strikes taking out both engines during takeoff (fortunately both with happy endings). Both were A320 series with CFM56-5 engines.
Now, the A320 is a common aircraft with thousands flying, and the CFM56-5 powers a goodly percentage of those. But there are also a whole lot of V2500 powered A320s, not to mention several thousand more 737s powered by CFM56-7 engines (different fan) - and none of those have had bird strike related dual engine power loss. Perhaps it's a statistical fluke, and the CFM56-5 bird strike resistance is just as good as the other engines, but if it was up to me I'd be taking a good, hard look at the -5 bird strike resistance...
The CFM56-7B has solid titanium wide chord fan blades, which are relatively tough with respect to impact damage. The -5 series has narrow chord fan blades.