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A Boeing 747-400 with 468 people aboard was forced to make an emergency landing in Indonesia on Wednesday after one of its engines caught fire and began shooting out flames during takeoff.
The Garuda Indonesia flight was bound for Medina, Saudi Arabia, which is the entry point for many Muslims making their pilgrimage to Mecca. It left from Indonesia’s international airport in Makassar, where clips showed one of the plane’s four engines becoming engulfed in flames during takeoff on Wednesday evening.
Videos of the engine fire were shared online by JACDEC, a plane crash data evaluation firm, which showed that the flames began just as the plane had lifted from the runway.
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The last 747-400 passenger plane rolled off the production line in 2005. This is either going to be a maintenance issue or the engine ingesting debris or a bird, not faulty construction. Boeing doesn’t even make the engines, it’s either GE, Pratt & Whitney, or Rolls Royce, depending on the original owner’s preference.
This here. As much as I hate the new Boeing philosophy, they used to build good planes and this issue is most certainly a maintenance problem or bird strike etc…
But it is rumored the bird was actually a suicidal whistleblower.
Ok but how does this stuff keep happening to Boeing planes?
Boeing is under increased public awareness, any issues get picked up and amplified by the news.
There’s about 100,000 flights a day in the world. Until very recently Boeing was the largest provider of commercial aircraft, and it’s still second largest next to airbus. It’s basically a duopoly with those two manufacturers providing the vast majority of planes. Even with the small rate of accidents, with so many flights every day involving Boeing planes there’s going to be a few.
Editors know anything relating to an airline accident and Boeing right now will get lots of clicks, they just throw that it’s a Boeing aircraft in the headline, then bury relevant facts indicating there’s really no way this could have anything to do with Boeing quality control in the article. And many of these are about events that happen from time to time anyways but wouldn’t normally make any sort of splash in the international news media, so suddenly it feels like you’re being bombarded with Boeing news. If the headline writer put GE or Rolls Royce airplane engine fire due to likely accidental bird collision, or Garuda Indonesia airline repair standards are subpar or something, it wouldn’t get any clicks.
Ok but how does this stuff keep happening to Boeing planes?
Shit happens to lots of planes. You just hear about the Boeing ones because reporting on them is in vogue.
I recently set up FlightRadar24 to alert me whenever a plane anywhere in the world starts squawking 7700, the emergency code. It’s REMARKABLE how often it happens. At least a few times per day, it seems like. There are well over 100,000 flights every day, and occasionally stuff goes wrong.
(And yet, whenever a fatal commercial air incident occurs it’s global news, because those are still exceptionally rare.)
Airbus has a ton of new planes grounded due to engine failures since before the door blowout. But you won’t hear about it because shitting on Boeing is what got clicks instead.
Garuda has an abysmal safety record. I’m banking it wasn’t a design or production issue with the 747.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Garuda_Indonesia_incidents_and_accidents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda_Indonesia#European_ban_(2007–2009)
Why would it being a maintenance problem make it any better at all?
“Don’t worry guys, the planes aren’t inherently defective, we’re just not maintaining them correctly!”
Super comforting.
Every time a Boeing plane has issues these days people are quick with low effort “Boeing bad” posts. Maintenance isn’t Boeing’s responsibility, it’s the airline’s.
Improper maintenance or birdstrike I’d assume
Improper bird maintenance.
- Bird in for service
Bird mechanic sucks teeth: well, the wings are out of alignment and some cowboy’s got the quack valve out of alignment. I can fix it, but it isn’t going to be cheep. Mind you, if you fly it like this you’re likely to have a nasty accident.
Customer: I know your tricks! Stop trying to up-sell me. I only brought it in for a beak polish. I’m going and I’m going to leave a bad review on twitter!
Bird takes off, immediately veers into the path of a plane, which promptly bursts into flames.
Bird mechanic: Told you.
They really just flap about and squawk at their subordinates
Proper birdstrike
Angry Bird strike.
The drones are fighting back
Instrike birdmance
Looks like the last passenger 747-400 was made in 2005. I think I’m willing to give Boeing a pass on this one. I get the feeling that Boeing personnel probably haven’t been anywhere near this plane in at least five, maybe ten years.
Indonesian air travel has been notorious for incidents over recent decades. Each of the country’s airlines were banned over E.U. and U.S. airspace in 2007 but were reinstated in 2016 and 2018. Since then, Garuda has joined the SkyTeam airline alliance, which includes North American carriers Delta Air Lines and Aeroméxico.
Maybe all of the passengers are whistle blowers…
This is another article that claimed a jet engine burst into flames, when all that happened was an engine surge. The engine didn’t catch fire, the engine did the jet version of a backfire, and only once during the takeoff roll.
But but but muh clicks! Muh ad revenue!! Who the hell cares about my affect on society!? I need muh clicks!
completed an approximately 90-minute holding pattern before safely returning to and landing in Makassar.
Lol wtf!? I get that it was past the point of no return and had to commit to take off but a 90 min wait to land again seems insane.
747s are designed to lose an engine in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and still be able to return to land safely. Literally.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
90m isn’t ideal, but perfectly fine.
It’s weird they designed it to lose an engine. They should have designed it not to lose an engine. That would have been better.
(((THEY))) don’t want that, though!!!
Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim
Can we have other internet infrastructure built that way too?
Well, we have already.
The Internet was designed to be resilient against nuclear war. Most protocols are resilient, it’s just been the last few years that some companies abused their positions (Cloudflare, Google) and it also came to light, that some protocols have been designed with a tad too much trust (BGP, SMTP).
I am aware… I meant more so with the recent trends… We have p2p ffs. So its not the tech its how its being built.
My guess is that they wanted the plane to use up most of the fuel before attempting the landing. As long as the plane is flying, the speed of the plane adds a level of safety to the fire. Once the plane lands and slows down, that fire would start affecting the rest of the wing much more, but there can’t be a big kaboom anymore if the fuel tanks are empty.
Long distance 747 flighs usually take off above the maximum landng weight. They need to get rid of the fuel before landing, but the 400 has the ability to dump fuel.
The engine wasn’t on fire. The engine had a surge on takeoff. They would have shut the engine off as it might have been damaged, but the plane was not on fire. They would have landed much sooner if it was.
Many articles describe engine surges with language that, while not technically a lie, is written to make readers conclude that the airplane is actually on fire.
This guy airplanes. Thanks for the info kind person!
Here come more derpwads that don’t understand that airline maintenance is a thing and Boeing has nothing to do with this
Their planes keep going down, but their stock keeps going up
“Keeps going up”
Yeah stop exaggerating. It’s down 30% since last December. It’s still trending downwards. And it’s 50% down since the highest price ever in 2019.
My point is, that most other companies would have shut down after all these incidents instead of “still trending downwards”
Would they have? Tesla, Toyota (prius brake issue), Samsung (battery fires and iirc dryer issues) Ford (exploding pinto iirc) Sacklers (opiates) all have blood/injuries on their hands from mistakes, willful negligence, or outright corruption and they’re all going strong.
Edit ah, I might be out of date on Perdue.
BP…
My samsung washer caught fire due to a firmware bug :)
Zoom out to the 5 year graph and it tells another story.
Also such events (which are non-catastrophic) are not entirely uncommon.
To me, it seems like these events are way beyond common. A single accident (even catastrophic) would be acceptable. What is going on at Boeing, seems to be way beyond acceptable!
Have you actually looked at data or are you just going by feel based on how many news articles you see?
I don’t disagree with your views on Boeing, but this incident is quite likely not related to Boeings problems, (other than their hard-earned public perception problem). Plane engines shouldn’t catch fire, but they do, whether that is rare bad luck or somebody screwed up is yet to be decided, but it sounds like this is not a newly minted plane, Boeing probably hasn’t touched it in years.
Not that Boeing hasn’t earned their public perception problem, but accidents happened before Boeing lost their mojo, and will continue to happen even if Boeing regain it. This incident may well turn out to have lessons once the investigation is done, and some might be directed at Boeing, but that’s not where I’d put my money this time around, it sounds unlikely that they caused this particular incident.
What is going on at Boeing, seems to be way beyond acceptable!
This specific plane was built in 2001, and its engines were made by Pratt & Whitney. Boeing doesn’t build the engines, 747 engines came from Pratt & Whitney, GE, or Rolls Royce depending on the preference of the original buyer.
Air incidents happen all the time (though fatalities are rare). You hear about the Boeing ones because Boeing is in the news (for very good reason, with regard to the 737 MAX and to a lesser extent the 787). But Boeing wasn’t responsible for this incident.
If anything, Boeing’s design of the 747 proved itself yet again. That plane successfully climbed and maintained a holding pattern for 90 minutes after an engine failure during takeoff.
Don’t get me wrong, modern Boeing needs to be overhauled. But older Boeing planes are still remarkably safe. (As are the current ones, the 787 has never suffered a fatality or a hull loss. But they’re playing a dangerous game with safety at the expense of profit lately.)
That’s because it’s not a company that makes planes. It’s a company that maximizes stock value and sometimes makes planes, shoddily, when forced to in order to keep the stock value up.
Why do they still let them take off? They are basically a time bomb
I would refuse any flight on a new Boeing plane (post 2019), but the 747 is a very reliable plane, and I would have zero problems with flying one today even after this event.
This is not Boeing’s fault.
