Dan Winterland
What makes you think it was a part of the fan blade that struck the fairing? Lots of other pieces fell off from the nacelle.
And is that really true about forward ejection? It certainly never looks like that in blade-off tests I have seen. And the maths also doesn't work out:
Even full forward load is tiny compared to the centripetal load, so any forward acceleration would not move it forward any significant amount in the time it would reach (a) the following blade trying to shove it backwards and (b) the containment ring, deflecting it unpredictably. So (b) could possibly deflect it forwards, but the talk about aerodynamic load is a red herring.
Look at the numbers: centripetal load per blade: 1 MN. Maximum forward aerodynamic load: 16 kN (rough numbers: 350 kN of thrust distributed over 22 blades). In the fraction of a second that blade would need to reach the containment ring, it would only accelerate to single-digit m/s forward speed component, and would have perhaps a 50th of a second to move. It wouldn't move more than a few centimetres forward.
TL;DR: yes, blades could be ejected forward, but not from aerodynamic loads, but from being deflected erratically by the containment ring.
Last edited by bsieker; 23rd Feb 2021 at 14:20.