<<I might be the first to point out that a shut-down is not necessarily a failure. I think the word is precautionary.>>
Is this not a semantic quibble? Surely with only two engines and one shut down (ie failing to produce thrust), there is only power available from one engine to reach a safe landing?
Regards
S
No problem in quibbling, since the issue is mostly statistical in nature and thus the term failure is dependent only on the outcome, safe flight, lower performance, increased pilot workload etc. etc.
Those that use the terms in assessing the impact on the flight consider all of the above and might not have used the word failure except in exact context. On the surface without additional details of engine symptoms, this shutdown might be entirely precautionary to prevent further damage.
And even with an engine shutdown on a twin there is more than adequate power to continue a flight to even the original destination.
I believe that we have talked the ETOPs subject to death before in other searchable threads so I'll just stick to surface issues of semantics here.
In researching IFSD (shutdown data) for both twins and quads it was noted that even with equally maintained engines (mixed fleets but same maintenance standards) that there were many more shutdowns per flight hour for quads then there was for twins. This suggests that the pilots were taking an abundance of precautionary shutdowns in Quads and it was for this reason that advice was given to consider only throttling back to idle a misbehaving engine in order to still have the use of its acessories (electrical, hydraulics)