Scary, anyone has an idea what might have happened?
Rough guess: a compressor blade fatigue and break failure, leading to trashing complete stage and flame-out. Good job in putting the aircraft in one piece on the ground.
Looks like a fatigue failure (crack propigation near the root) of a turbine blade. I guess the NTSB would want to look at this as its a PT-6 failure and they are used a lot in commercial GA aircraft.
Sorry, it is a 40+ min video, is there a summary somewhere?
“… 77MM, out of 22’000ft, catastrophic exploded engine failure, gliding to your field …”, this is what happened
Dan wrote:
“… 77MM, out of 22’000ft, catastrophic exploded engine failure, gliding to your field …”, this is what happened
@Dan, it is a turbine with a sh$%load of energy, they DO fail, and sometimes they fail spectacularly, as you well know from your career. :)
The question is if it was a contained or uncontained engine failure.
If it was contained engine failure, then, well, IT happens, so what.
If it was an UNcontained engine failure, then it would be more like “Dear Pratt & Whitney, WTF?!” and then the full blown NTSB investigation.
Haven’t watched the video but AIUI, compressor blade failures are supposed to be contained, while turbine (the back end) failures don’t need to be contained because it is too difficult. AIUI the main reason for containing the former is bird strikes and such.
Ok, if you guys want the tech details, it’s all there, use FF to 12:03
Looks suspiciously like an uncontained engine failure, which shouldn’t happend and PT should have proven the regulators that is improbable, as it is not the case, they’ve got some explaining to do…
arj1 wrote:
Looks suspiciously like an uncontained engine failure, which shouldn’t happend and PT should have proven the regulators that is improbable, as it is not the case, they’ve got some explaining to do…
As the author mentioned in video, it’s an engine with unknown history, so anything could happen in the past to these blades, exposing them to temperatures and strain beyond the limitations causing the effects of fatigue to be more prominent than expected. One broken blade can cause (and probably caused) a havoc in compressor causing engine catastrophic failure.