Thanks greatly for all the replies (well, nearly all of them
), that does make perfect sense and it's always interesting to know a bit more about the way these things work.
Just to clarify, I'm not the kind of person who worries about these things and my query was more from curiosity about a handful of what I would consider unusual things on a flight than a sense of "oh my God I could have been killed
". I'm well aware that PAXboy's comment that "the crew will have experienced this before and the aircraft is well able to handle such variations" can be extended to cover pretty much anything that happens during the course of a flight. I just wanted to know whether my imagination was running away with me and it would appear that, as usual, it was.
Edit: "The blades in the engine are very finely balanced, and will rotate, like a windmill, in a very light breeze." - that's exactly how it was, they were only barely turning, I assumed they'd kept it on just enough to keep the inside lights on after the captain made a cryptic comment about only turning off one of the engines once we were "plugged in" to the ground power supply
