PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Air India engineer sucked into an aircraft engine at Mumbai
Old 17th Dec 2015, 18:43
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tdracer
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Everett, WA
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It may be interesting to note that human ingestion events were far more likely in the days before high bypass engines became the norm. When JT3C/D and JT8D engines were the norm, people were not nearly as cautious and ingestion events were not particularly uncommon. Of course, since those engine had inlet guide vanes, an ingestion event was not automatically fatal (although they occasionally were). There is a video out there (presumably on you-tube if someone wants to search) where, during carrier ops, a crewman gets ingested into a (IIRC) A-6. The engine promptly surges and spits him back out with non-life threatening injuries.

For a surprisingly long time after big fan engines became common, there were no human ingestion events - presumably because an couple meter diameter fan, unprotected, spinning at several hundred rpm provided sufficient fear factor to keep people alert.
Unfortunately that record didn't remain intact, but given the tens of thousands of big turbofan operations that occur each and day world wide (and the lax safety standards in some areas), such events remain remarkably (and thankfully) rare.
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