Originally Posted by
Vessbot
On our QRH for total electrical failure, (different type) one of the first few lines is "have both engines failed?" I thought it was pretty funny at first, but was then some good food for thought.
Vess, as I noted, it's happened. Boeing added an "ENG FAIL" EICAS message during the development of the 747-400 in large part due to the number of times flight crews had performed troubleshooting of an electrical issue without realizing anengine had quit (777 and 787 have both ENG FAIL - sub idle - and ENG THRUST - thrust is more than 10% away from command and not responding). For reasons I never understood, 'ENG FAIL' logic was added to 767 EICAS, but never enabled
.
We had a case roughly 15 years ago - a 767 was descending through Ice Crystal Icing, both engines flamed out (non-FADEC, so no auto-relight, but they had engine anti-ice on which provides continuous ignition). The crew spent several minutes troubleshooting a total electrical failure without realizing the engines were not running
. Eventually they exited the Ice Crystals, the engines relite and recovered, while the crew as puzzled as to why the electrical problem went away. It was only after the flight data was downloaded and analyzed that it became apparent the problem was a dual engine flameout.
