On Saturday a United Boeing 777 suffered a major engine failure shortly after takeoff, as debris from the engine ”rained” on a Denver suburb. It’s important to note that while a 777 was the aircraft involved, it seems that this has more to do with the Pratt & Whitney 4000-112 engine on the plane, rather…
Continue reading: Boeing 777s With Pratt & Whitney Engines Grounded (Mostly)
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Lucky - Covid cases are down, TSA travel numbers are back up, and many people are planning spring and summer travel, including newly vaccinated people. Let's get some posts on the current state of play in travel
Better option to go with GE90s as it were but this makes that decision even more clear.
I guess back in 2018 UA really really needed those planes to keep flying due to demand so they just put that incident aside without further review... whereas today UA has a lot of planes in storage to replace these 777s so UA finally wanted Pratt & Whitney to investigate this more.
At this point, United is lucky to have merged with Continental. In addition to the new post-merger 777-300ERs that are GE powered, all 777s that came from Continental are GE powered.
While the engines are not as old as the airframes, there likely are more of these fan blade engines with the PW4000s because of their age as well.
UA has done no large-scale widebody retirements unlike AA and DL and other global airlines.
More frequent inspections are bound to happen but the increased cost and potential replacement of some parts might hasten the demise of these early 777s.
Lucky, smaller version of the engine bought on fire in the Netherlands https://nypost.com/2021/02/22/jfk-bound-planes-engine-caught-fire-dropped-debris-over-netherlands/
As Abey wrote, a 747 this time had a problem with a P&W engine:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/22/dutch-investigate-boeing-747-after-engine-parts-drop-after-takeoff-netherlands
It looks like United has swapped in 772's with the true Polaris cabin on the Hawaii routes this week. Someone is going to be happy with that change.
I'm booked to fly OGG-SFO on Thursday. I flew here on a polaris 772er, and was supposed to fly back on one as well. Now in the app it says we will be flying back on a 752 with 2x2 first. 🙁
The UK has also banned these 777 from flying in it's airspace https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSS8N2JN0CF
@Lucky about how long do you think it will take for the FAA to develop the inspection protocol? Also, how long do you think until all of the affected 777's are inspected and can return to service?
What about the replacement flight for the United plane that had the failure? Was that one of the planes they're now pulling out of service?
They are saying they don’t know how to inspect fan blades that have been around for more than 25 years? Really?