PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Wall Street Journal reports on BA 747 3 engine LAX-MAN flight
Old 28th Sep 2006, 08:55
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FullWings
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Tring, UK
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Originally Posted by Kengineer-130
...in my humble opinion, any signs of fire should be treated with the upmost of urgency and respect...
I like to have fires burning pretty much all of the time in all of my engines. I get quite upset if any of them go out!

What I don't wish to happen is for hot gases to make their way out of the engine core containment into the more delicate structures surrounding it - this is what fire detection/suppression facilities are for. As I understand it, the flight in question did not receive any overheat/fire warnings so the crew did not need to carry out the associated drills.

An engine surge can (as in this case) be quite spectacular to an observer but a 10m flame coming out of the back for a short period only signifies that the fuel/air mix inside is temporarily wrong - not that any damage has actually occurred. That is for Engineering to decide when they downlink the recording of the surge and examine it.
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