PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Qantas A380 uncontained #2 engine failure
Old 3rd Dec 2010, 09:02
  #1564 (permalink)  
mike-wsm
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This is a philosophical point which will not have escaped professional pilots and design staff, but I make no apology for spelling it out in its full simplicity.

Many thousands of highly educated aerospace engineers have put immense amounts of effort into making the aircraft multiply redundant and failure-tolerant so that any one failure or set of failures can be survived.

Yet a single component failure in an engine caused such a massive event that the multiple systems in the aircraft were disabled to an extent that came very close to disaster and it took very skilful and highly discilplined management to salvage the situation.

Is there a cultural difference between airframe and engine manufacturers and is there any way that the gap can be bridged? Or is it a simple and necessary fact of engineering that engines of this power and thrust cannot be made safe in the same way that airframes are?