Originally Posted by
RHPrague
I've been meaning to ask this for years...
When I'm on an A320 taking off and climbing there's a loud and persistent whine on top of what I'd call "normal" engine noise, but I guess the whine is normal as I hear it often. It disappears as the plane levels off a bit after the initial steep climb. I took a BA 320 back from LHR on Sunday night, it was loud. On the outbound service, a 319, I hardly noticed it . What is it? Is it a characteristic of an older 320 version, or a certain engine?
Thanks in advance!
The A320 family has been through quite a lot of engines, look then up on Wikipedia, both ceo and neo had more than one choice of engine. I think you'd almost need to know the tail number of the aircraft you were on to tell which engine you were flying with.
These days, aircraft manufacturers tend to specify one or at the most two engine manufacturers for each airframe, for ease of maintenance and commonality of spares. Back in the 1990s, airlines could pretty much mix-and-match the engines to go on their airframe. Almost all engines apart from the RR Trent (which doesn't feature on the A320 family) are two-spool designs and should sound roughly alike. So your whistling engines need a cleverer head than mine.