AF277

[olen]

Hi there,

The local news (New Caledonia) reported yesterday about an incident on AF277 taking off from Tokyo NRT last monday, sept 27th. B777 is about to take off. As soon as full power is applied, a huge bang is heard and flames appear from the left engine. Take-off is aborted (obviously :O) and engines stopped. The plane is not evacuated but towed back to gate. Passengers get out while maintenance work on the engine for a couple of hours. Passengers are then told to board again. On take-off attempt number two, the same thing happens : explosion noise and flames from left engine. Plane is towed back to gate, passengers sent to a hotel to take another flight the next day.

For a non-pilot like me, the whole thing sounds quite shocking. Has anybody heard of this incident? Does anybody know what happened?

[hetfield]

Don't know about it.
But please take care with words like "explosion" and "plane NOT evacuated".

For me this story sounds like a simple engine stall. It's like in your car if for example the ignition isn't working correctly.
In this stage of flight, starting T/O roll, there is no imminent danger with this kind of malfunction and absolutely no reason to evacuate 300+ people.

[wiggy]

Nothing in the press at the French end.



Sounds (and this is only a guess, in keeping with the spirit of a "Rumours Network") to me a bit like an engine surge, where the airflow through the engine gets disturbed for some reason and the combustion process gets disrupted - similar to a car backfiring. It can be very very, noisy, and very spectacular -lots of flames, but essentially harmless unless it persists for a period of time.

So maybe they had a surge on the first power up for take-off, shut the engine down, and were towed back to gate (A 777 at near max take-off weight cannot taxi on one engine). Engineer(s) had a look at it and did maintenance as/if required. When they powered up again on the runway there was another surge....at which point flight is delayed/cancelled because engineers obvioulsy haven't fixed the problem and need a harder/longer look.



Whatever happened it seems no one got hurt, they didn't go flying with a possibly suspect bad engine..so not much else to say...