I’m one of those flyers who checks the manufacture date on the airframe plate when stepping onto a commercial jet. Just curious, dontcha know.
How many passengers boarding United 328 yesterday out of Denver headed for Honolulu did that, I wonder? While climbing through 12,000 feet, the jet’s right Pratt & Whitney PW4000 experienced a catastrophic failure. It flew apart.
Jeff Wise at New York Magazine uncovered these details:
The United Airlines 777 that suffered an uncontained engine failure this afternoon over Broomfield, Colorado, was the third oldest 777 in operation. The aircraft, tail number N772UA, first flew in 1994 and was delivered to United in September, 1995, three months after the 777 made its first commercial flight for the airline that June.
The shell is designed to contain shards in cases like this. That did not happen Saturday during a rare engine failure. Pieces from the engine rained down on Broomfield, Colo. about 20 miles west-northwest of the airport. There were 231 passengers and ten crew members aboard. The plane landed safely. No one was hurt on board or on the ground. Lucky.
One piece of debris fell through the roof of a house narrowly missing a man standing two feet away.
Wise adds:
Such uncontained engine failures can be extremely dangerous, as flying pieces can hit fuel tanks, shred control surfaces, sever hydraulic lines, pierce an aircraft’s pressure hull, or hit passengers or crew. In 2018, a passenger aboard a Southwest 737 was killed when one of the plane’s engines exploded and a piece of debris shattered her window; the resulting depressurization caused the top half of her body to be sucked out through the breach.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board will collect as many pieces as possible from the ground as well as examine the portion of the engine that remained attached and study flight data recorders in order to determine what caused the catastrophic failure. It’s not currently known if the engine that failed was the original delivered with the plane to United in 1995, but if so its maintenance history will receive special scrutiny. Repeated stresses over time can cause microscopic fractures within metal that will eventually propagate and ultimately break if not detected in time.
More video and pictures from the accident below.
This could have been worse (below). The falling engine cowl crushed the cab of a pickup truck in the driveway of the home below before toppling over and against a tree.
My spouse is a nervous flyer. White knuckles on takeoff and landing. An aborted landing once had her totally unnerved. (I’ve been in two where the runway was not quite clear.) Our running joke upon landing safely is that once again, she’s cheated death.
For those aboard United 328 it was no joke.