A330-200 flameout / relight of both engines on approach
 

https://thepointsguy.com/news/a330-s...nes-in-flight/

The A330-200, built in 2000 and flying with the Belgian registration 00-SFU, was bound for Brussels from Kinshasa on December 11 when it experienced a failure of the left Pratt and Whitney PW4000 while cruising at 40,000 ft. The pilots immediately declared an emergency and planned to divert to Djerba, in Tunisia, as a precaution. The pilots, while working the problem, were able to get the left engine to reignite, and chose instead to proceed to Brussels.

The flight proceeded without incident until its approach into Brussels. The Belgian aviation saferty agency BEA is reporting that on approach the right-hand PW4000 failed and reignited multiple times. The pilots landed the plane safely at Brussels and at the time of touchdown both engines were powered.

Though there was no point in the flight in which the plane didn’t have one of its two engines powered, failure of both engines during a single flight is very rare. The 18-year old aircraft is still on the ground in Brussels while the investigation into the incident proceeds.

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What could be the common element here? Fuel system?

all sorts of bad things can happen when this happens including an engine stuck at high power during landing approaches as well as the opposite (stuck at low power).

What should have been the appropriate procedure here? While I know this was not an ETOPS flight, if an engine shuts down during flight -- even if it relights, isn't it appropriate to land at the nearest suitable airport -- especially if the reason for the shutdown is not absolutely known with certainty by the crew. It will be interesting to learn what their thinking was in deciding to continue on to BRU.

As long as they thought about it, I have no complaints

I've never understood the logic of continuing if an engine shuts down and you then manage to restart it. It's not as if they shutdown as a matter of course. Something is wrong, even if you don't know what.

Yes, something wrong, but if you are up in the air, isn't the most conservative action to remain up there? Rather than to try to land overweight. The risk of an engine failure is not something that urgently demands you be on the ground ASAP.

No, but as you don't know why the engine failed (and then relit) in the first place, isn't the risk really more like the Cathay double failure case.

Departing from Kinshasa and problems with both engines would put contaminated fuel right at the top of the list. Icing could be a possibility as could any work done on the engines during the transit.

Start with the most likely and work from there.

The risk of both engines failing is something that urgently demands you to be on the ground ASAP.

What on earth posessed them to continue to BRU after the first failure?
That really is not very smart.

Brussels Airlines A330 - both engines failed
 

Already covered in this thread:A330-200 flameout / relight of both engines on approach

Nor me.

That's two extreme opposite approaches to dealing with an engine failure in a few weeks - Norwegian engine failure (just low oil pressure wasn't it?) - spiral down to a place you really really don't want to put a an aeroplane, it's passengers and crew, when a descent in a straight line would put you close to a good diversion field (KWI) ...

And continuing to destination in a twin, after an engine failure.

The sensible approach must be somewhere between (albeit closer to the former option imo) ..

Agreed... I came across this flight while looking at recent EIO diversions. Looks like the same flight different date?
Geneva to Brussels (287nm) is a bit further than Shiraz to KWI (243nm) would have been.

Incident: Brussels A332 near Geneva on Nov 5th 2018, engine shut down in flight

A Brussels Airlines Airbus A330-200, registration OO-SFZ performing flight SN-359 (dep Nov 4th) from Kinshasa N'djili (DR Congo) to Brussels (Belgium), was enroute at FL400 about 20nm east of Geneva (Switzerland) within French Airspace when the left hand engine (PW4168) emitted a loud bang, the crew received an "ENG1 STALL" warning. The crew shut the engine down, drifted down to FL280 and continued to Brussels for a safe landing about 55 minutes later.

Incident: Brussels A332 near Geneva on Nov 5th 2018, engine shut down in flight

guess the whole discussion is about nearest "in point of time" or as they used to say anyway....

Then you probably don't want to hear about the "Emirates B773 near Iqaluit on 18 July 2018 (engine shut down in flight)" that flew single engine for TWO HOURS to land at Goose Bay?

Incident: Emirates B773 near Iqaluit on Jul 18th 2018, engine shut down in flight

I understand they were about 10 minutes past Iqaluit.
A Swiss B773 landed at Iqaluit on Feb 1st 2017.

I wouldn't get too excited about that; there are now, or very soon will be, ETOPS flights which allow up to 7 hours to reach a diversion after losing one engine. (I admit that I'm assuming that Airbus managed this for the A350, I haven't bothered to keep up. And 330 minutes sounds just as bad, to me.)

Not with me on board; but if you have faith in statistics you can enjoy the 420 minutes struggling along on one engine over the chilly ocean. Sorry; for "struggling" read "cruising happily", that was just a lapse by this old dinosaur. What we ODs just cannot grasp is that so long as you maintain your ETOPS aircraft a little bit better, a double-engine failure in a twin is, well, just impossible. Isn't it?

the whole point is these folks in the 330, apparently did not for whatever reason, land at the nearest suitable airport, the other flights mentioned above have nothing to do with this, as it it is quite possible their nearest suitable airport/designated ETOPS alternate may have been further away..

It's not faith in statistics, it's faith in economics - the failure rate has been reduced to the point where it's cheaper to pay off the hull loss and the relatives of the souls rather than improve the hardware. And let's face it, anyone except US citizens have a low compensation cost.

Also the calculation behind twin-engine ETOPS leverages the fact that once an occasional 2-engine airframe loss is computed into the fleet ownership costs, what increases is insurance overhead, but eg. a 3 engine would probably have higher maintenance overhead due to the greater number of individual engine units to maintain.

But that way when you're in seat 0A and lose a donk over the blue, you get to show the right stuff and smile.

As an SLF and an engineer, I always liked 747s :)

Edmund

So how many planes have crashed due to a lack of engines that worked?

And I am just talking "big" aircraft here, if you look from the B707&DC8 era all the way to A330, A321LR, B737max, B777 aso, how many hull losses would have been prevented, if only they had a few more engines?

Clip from the movie Fight Club.



"On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

"I was a recall coordinator. My job was to apply the formula. ... A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at mph. The rear differential locks up. ... The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? ... Take the number of vehicles in the field, A. Multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B. Multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A x B x C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

For solely mechanical issues and excluding events like US1549 I think none... yet. With the issues RR has had with their Trent 1000 on the 787 and PW issues with their GTF on the 320neo the theoretically "statistically insignificant" odds must have increased a bit?

You would probably have to count US1549, even though the cause was environmental there would have been a remote chance that an additional engine might have retained sufficient thrust to get the aircraft to a suitable (there's that word again) field. Against that, how many hull losses have resulted from a single catastrophic failure of or around an engine? UA232, LY1862,QF32 (almost) for a start. Having more engines that could save you also means having more engines that could kill you.

my bigger concern over the middle of the water somewhere at night, would be a blazing cargo fire...

You would probably have to count US1549, even though the cause was environmental there would have been a remote chance that an additional engine might have retained sufficient thrust to get the aircraft to a suitable (there's that word again) field. Against that, how many hull losses have resulted from a single catastrophic failure of or around an engine? UA232, LY1862,QF32 (almost) for a start. Having more engines that could save you

No idea why threads degenerate into number of engines after an event

Nobody adds engines purely for redundancy. They are added for performance reasons.

Given that the number of engines is performance based, that the more engines the more failure combinations per flight and once you start adding the loss of more than a single engine you're going to be performance limited far more often te US1549 event.and in the news more often.

If you just feel more comfortable with more engines than maybe they ought to add a syllabus to training to certify a pilots ability to handle multiple engine outs in takeoff bird ingestions etc.

Also BA38, although it was fuel icing it was very transient and difficult to reproduce, on a four-holer (or three) the difference in temperature exposure of tanks and pipes etc. between inboard and outboard might have been enough that at least two of the engines would have spooled up when they asked for power, and that is probably all they needed.

If you loose two engines during takeoff, on anything short of a B-52 you're probably going to have a really bad day - the extra engine(s) just mean you have slightly more control over where you're going to crash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_A...entry_accident
If having more than two engines made the aircraft inherently safer, you'd expect to see that in the fatal hull loss statistics. Yet the 747-400 rate is more than twice what it is for the 757, 767, 777, or A330 (and you don't even want to ask about the MD-11).

I'll take the Lockheed L-1011 when it comes to jets with more that two engines.
I always liked that plane for a variety of reasons and safety wasn't bad either.

Upvote. .