|
|
We are pleased to bring you The Travel
Column, written for "The Trinidad Guardian"
WHAT HAPPENS IF AN AIRPLANE’S ENGINES FAIL?
Now don’t tell me you have NEVER had this thought whilst
you were 35,000 feet in the air! I think anyone who travels regularly must
have had this thought at one time or another. Hey, this crosses my mind
probably EVERY TIME I’m on an aircraft!
So what really would happen? According to our travel
colleague, David Rowell (a.k.a. The Travel Insider), the news is good - it
is exceedingly rare for a plane to lose power in all engines. The even
better news - if a plane does lose engine power, while cruising at normal
speed and altitude, it’s probably going to land safely. With his
permission, I’m going to let you in on the secrets of jet engines, and why
you’re really much safer in the air, than you otherwise think you might
be!
WHAT MIGHT CAUSE JET ENGINES TO FAIL?
Modern jet engines are incredibly reliable. Add to their
designed reliability, the high quality of regularly scheduled maintenance,
and there will be very few times when an in-flight problem occurs. In
addition, modern engines automatically monitor themselves, conducting
computerized self-diagnostics and analyzing their actual performance while
in flight. However, nothing is infallible. Occasionally the turbine blades
might break. Another source of turbine fan damage comes from ingesting
foreign materials - either something loose on the ground or (quite common)
a bird. Or something might go wrong with the electrics, the fuel, the
lubrication or even air supply. The fuel might contain impurities that
damage the engine, or the plane might simply run out of fuel. Most
problems that can occur typically affect only one engine. And any modern
passenger plane with two or three engines can operate more or less
normally on only one engine for an extended period of time (ie for some
hours). A four-engined plane will work happily on two engines, and with
one engine it becomes a sort of 'super long range glider'.
HOW COMMON IS IF FOR A PLANE TO LOSE POWER IN ALL
ENGINES?
Very uncommon. This might happen, somewhere in the
world, no more often than once every 5 to 10 years.
LOSING POWER IN SOME BUT NOT ALL ENGINES:
This sometimes happens, and chances are you'll probably
never even know that it has occurred, but for sure the pilots on the
flight deck are very aware of such a situation. If they can't restart the
engine and assure themselves that the problem is resolved, they'll
immediately divert the plane and land it at a nearby airport.
LOSING POWER IN ALL ENGINES:
Don't panic. Statistically, it’s extremely rare that
this will actually happen, and even if it did, you would have a very good
chance of surviving such a situation. If a plane loses all power, it does
not then just fall out of the sky. Instead, it becomes a very big and
rather clumsy glider, but it still will have an amazing controllability,
although not quite as readily as with the engines. It can still maneuver
left and right, and can also vary its rate of descent, but it can no
longer ascend or stay flying at a particular altitude.
A plane can land without needing to use its engines.
Gliders do it all the time, and there is no reason why a passenger jet
cannot land without engine power as well. It is likely that the plane's
cabin pressurization will also fail. This would be a gradual failure, and
then the oxygen masks would drop down in front of you. There’s ten to
fifteen minutes of oxygen supply through this system, and by the time it’s
used up, the pilot will have smoothly glided the plane down to below
15,000 ft, at which point you'll no longer need the breathing masks.
If the plane loses all power while at cruise altitude,
the first thing the pilot needs to do is to accept that he has irrevocably
lost power and to switch his focus from trying to recover power to
planning how and where to land. It can take a minute or two for this
realization to dawn, but pilots are required, as policy, to immediately
assume the worst - while still, of course, doing all they can to bring
about the best possible outcome. He should then climb steeply to convert
the extra forward speed into extra height. The higher the plane gets, the
less air resistance and the more range it will have. The pilot will
probably get another thousand or two feet of altitude before the plane
slows down to its most efficient glide speed, which is somewhere between
200-225 mph.
So, there you are, in a plane at, say, 35,000 ft, with
no power. Your plane can probably travel ten to twelve times as far in a
forward direction as it has height to lose - so at 35,000 ft, the plane
can go about 85 miles, maybe more. The plane will also have about 20
minutes of flying time before the altimeter reaches zero. Which then leads
to a very big question - is there a place to land within 85 miles of where
the power loss occurred? When you keep in mind that this gives the pilot
not just 85 miles of straight ahead, but also nearly as much travel to
each side, and perhaps 70 miles back the way he came, that gives him
almost 20,000 square miles of territory in which to hope to find an
airport!
Go to
www.thetravelinsider.info/2003/0314.html for more information on what
happens if an airplane’s engine fails! Anyway, if all this offers little
comfort to those who are truly afraid of flying, please refer to our
website at
www.the-travel-centre.com/travel_columns/col030213.html for our
previous article, "Discover the Possibilities – Overcome your Fear of
Flying"!
Melanie Waddell, Director
trvlcentre.tt@gmail.com
June 12, 2003
Previous Travel Columns
|
