It may well be but staying onboard might be the best of a whole load of poor options.

I have no direct experience of the joys of Goose but if the terminal is limited and there's no easy access to hotels keeping umpteen hundred passengers onboard where they are warm, sheltered with access to food, drinks etc...might be a smart move.

Where on earth would you put 400+ people at Goose Bay?

Ok, worth knowing, ta...if OTOH if as rumoured AF can run a fairly immediate "rescue" I guess it would be logistically easier to keep folks airside/onboard and do a tarmac transfer of pax (bags? ..who knows) than disperse folks to hotels in the area only to have to return them to the airport a handful of hours later.

In any event all a bit hypothetical until we see what AF actually do organise.

Is the loss of one of four a reason to divert?
As one who regularly flies the Atlantic on two, I'm a bit surprised, unless it caused further damage, of course.

I would put money on the fan being nowhere near the containment ring.. That is a licenced aircraft engineers thoughts on the matter. I know absolutely nothing of fan blade retention methods, curvic couplings or how a high bypass turbofan is constructed. :E

Check out the video linked above, with the loose part dangling in the airstream (tube? wiring harness?). You'd want to land ASAP in case any other bits fly off, and damage the wing.

If it had been a controlled shut-down and not something this extreme, I imagine they might have finished the flight.

Air France plane engine fails over Atlantic - BBC News

..... said passengers had been told two Air France 777s were on the way from Montreal to pick up the passengers.

FBO is a small office, old and smelling of smoke!
However Goose Bay is a huge air force base, 95% unoccupied. Barracks maintained for German and other forces who used to train there, electricity and heat on permanently. Weekend services generally maintained for a few staff only. Most gone home for week end and not answering their phones, I suspect.

Unless AF have a 380 or a couple of other planes (don't know how loaded they were) lying around unused and crews to fly them it's going to take a lot more than 8 hours to get anything on the ground there to lift the passengers. Perhaps the captain (or their managers) is an optimist.

I appreciate the crew's caution, no need for an emergebncy evacuation if everything stabilized prior to landing, however the aircraft has sustained a substantial damaging event and if I was crew or passenger I would want everyone off the aircraft immediately after landing 'just in case.' Not good sitting in a badly damage aircraft for seven or eight hours.

Edit: Missed Beamender's post. Interesting.

No hotel needed, Two 777's are in the air on the way to relieve them from Montreal.

Was this a fan disk failure, or an LP shaft failure? If the shaft went ping, the fan would hurtle out the front (taking who knows what with it), and the LP turbine would come out the back pretty quickly too.

I'd like to know if the LP turbine is still on the aircraft...

If this is a shaft failure, this could be pretty bad news for GP7000 operators. GE did have issues early on with hydrogen embrittlement of shafts on their 787 engine; it was so bad that brand new engines were falling to pieces on their first run (the problem got sorted pretty quickly though). Anyway, if it is this one wonders what that does to the flight worthiness of the GP7000 fleet. AFAIK it's pretty difficult to inspect for embrittlement; you simply have to wait until it falls to pieces. We could be looking at a worldwide grounding for quite a while...

It's a mercy that all those heavy bits seemed to have mostly missed the rest of the airframe on departure. Well done the pilots for opting to get on the ground sharpish.

EDIT

Looking at the video posted above the tailcone of the engine is seemingly in good shape. So the LP turbine hasn't come smashing out through the back of the engine.

I'm sure the Canada Border Services Agency would be totally overwhelmed if asked to process that number of people at CYYR. Much better to await a relief a/c and do a ramp transfer - they will have adequate food and water for awhile yet.

I doubt it'll take that long. In the Swissair 773 diversion to Iqaluit a few months ago they had an A330 out of NYC on the scene in less than eight hours, I think.

Curvic coupling looks like it is still there, I would suspect the LP shaft is still sitting in its bearings. Does look like the disc has failed, whenever it is due to another event or disc failure, well that is what investigations are for.

Per a passenger tweeting from AF66 (@johnnybirk), announced that two a/c en route, first arriving in 5hrs.

Ah, sharp eyes.

This is certainly at the extreme end of the spectrum of Fan disk failures.

As the rest of us will be for some time to come.

Without the offending disk to examine, we may never know precisely what occurred. Fan disk or front bearing/shaft failure seems the most likely scenarios as a fan blade failure at cruise N1 generally does not lead to fan case separation.

Be interesting to see what they do with the 380.

https://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/448810acbd.jpg

...compliments of Aviation Herald

Looks like the plan is to take the 777 about to land at YUL and send to YYR as the YUL-CDG leg has been scrubbed. Airlive reckons a 737 is coming from somewhere also.

Remove the remaining engine and cowling debris, along with the strut, and have AB Engineering Flight Test crew do a three engine ferry back to CDG??

To add for armchair speculators, there is low speed type damage and high speed type damage to look for.

One may be grossly greater in appearance but simply due to rundown after a highspeed event.

From a (un) containment threat standpoint I have yet to see any substantial damage to the underside of a wing. Thus this event while being costly may not have disabled any other critical systems and the aircraft was able to make a safe flight and landing as intended by design.