Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Simple Flying"
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It's really hard to tell, given airplane turbine engines run on bird blood.
Oh wait, they don't, they run on kerosene.
Bird blood and feathers were found inside of the engines, the source could only be the birds committed bloody suicide while nesting inside of the engines or the birds were ingested and wrecked the engines.
Had the pilots continued their initial landing attempt, they'd have had manual hydraulic brakes, no hydraulic boosting beyond any residual pressure that'd bleed off quickly, but full flaps, spoilers and landing gear.
Instead, they went TOGA, had no thrust to climb high enough to gain time to spool up the APU and basically ran out of hands, altitude, speed and ideas, so did the only thing possible - reciprocal landing, a 180 degree turn, trading what little altitude they had for airspeed to stay aloft.
Basically, the bird strike that killed the engines happened at literally the worst possible time, over the threshold, seconds from landing.
Because, I've seen the damage that large birds can do to an aircraft and more importantly, a jet engine and fan. They'll take that marvel of modern engineering and turn it straight and instantly into modern art.
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The real question is, what's the policy for a bird strike and possible dual engine loss on final and especially once inside the inner marker and essentially at landing?
That might be something worthy of examining and addressing, as the strike essentially took out both engines at literally the worst possible moment in a landing sequence.
The usual inclination would be to TOGA, climb, go around while evaluating what damage has occurred and run checklists. But, with both engines out at that point, the amount of energy available for a climb is tiny and the amount of time to clean up configuration to lower drag and try both restart and bring the APU online is vanishingly small, given the APU would likely become available to provide power a few seconds after touchdown on that only option available under those conditions, a reciprocal landing.
Training might also be worthy of addressing, as I'm unaware of any training that has a dual engine bird strike induced thrust loss that late in the approach to landing. And one's basically stuck under those conditions entirely with memory items, no time to run any checklists, hell, barely enough time to even pull the appropriate checklist out.
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It's a mathematical problem, really.
Each flight officer was deficiently issued only two arms, supporting two hands.
The initial TOGA, now that's a question, what's the airline SOP on bird strike and dual engine failure on final?
Because, had they continued on to land, they were already configured for it, they'd just not have thrust reversers and have manual brakes, which still would've been better than wheels up, no flaps, spoilers or speed brakes and their only braking system being what's essentially a bunker like wall from hell.
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