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Nice
Quality!
You
won't believe the following story and photos, but it actually
happened.
You
might want to think twice the next time you fly on the Chinese
airlines.
A pilot for the Chinese carrier requested permission and landed
at FRA (Frankfurt, Germany) for an unscheduled refueling stop.
The reason soon became
apparent to the ground crew: The Number 3 engine had been
shutdown previously because of excessive vibration, and because
it didn't look too good. The photos show the condition of the #3
engine when the airliner arrived in Frankfurt with a load of
passengers. The engine had sometime previously encountered
something hard, like rocks and instead of changing the engine,
the airline decided to immobilize the engine with seatbelts and
send it off with three engines.
Hey,
super human pilots can do such things.
And, if the pilots had refused they would probably wind
up in a salt mine somewhere. It had apparently been no problem
for the tough guys back in China. They took some sturdy straps
and wrapped them around two of the fan blades and the stationary
stator blades behind, thus stopping any unwanted
windmilling (engine spinning
by itself due to airflow passing thru the blades during flight) and associated uncomfortable vibration caused
by the severely out of
balance fan blades. Note that the straps are seatbelts ... how
resourceful! After making the "repairs", off they
flight on only three engines! Paris was the destination. With
the increased fuel consumption, they got a bit low on fuel and
just set it down a few hundred miles from their destination for
a quick refill. That's when the problems started.
The
Germans, who are kind of picky about this stuff, inspected the
malfunctioning engine and immediately grounded the aircraft.
(Besides the seatbelts, notice the appalling condition of the
fan blades.) The airline operator had to send a chunk of money
to get the first engine replaced (took about 10 days) The repair
contractor decided to do some impromptu inspection work on the
other engines, none of which looked all that great either. The
result: a total of 3 engines were eventually changed on this
plane before it was permitted to fly again
Courtesy
of Alejandro Irausquín and his friend, Kevin
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