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Uh oh someone has some explaining to do! I am extremely curious as to what exactly happened.....
Nikita Khrushchev said"We can't expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism. "
I work out there and didn't hear anything about it. The best was about 3 years ago at the same hanger. 767 parked at the fence line along the street(World Way West). Mechanics go to bleed the brakes and forget to choke the wheels. Well of course the plane rolls forward(very small incline) and ends up going through trhe fence out into the street. Major oops! I'll see if I can get more pics tonite.
Airliner Engine Breaks Apart, Defying Federal Repair Effort
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By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: June 19, 2006
WASHINGTON, June 18 — Federal investigators say they are deeply concerned about an engine break-up that nearly destroyed a Boeing 767 on the ground in Los Angeles this month because the failure may indicate a recurrence of a problem they thought they had eliminated in 2003.
American Airlines mechanics were testing the engine on June 2 , after the crew of an earlier flight had reported it was not performing properly. During the test, an internal disk came apart, slicing open a fuel tank in the left wing; the fuel spilled onto the ground, where it caught fire. One piece of metal was thrown more than half a mile from the plane.
There were no injuries, and under the rules of the National Transportation Safety Board the event might not even qualify as an accident because there was no intention to fly the plane. But experts say that such "uncontained failures," so called because the engine cowling does not hold in the debris, resemble a roulette game.
"There's 360 degrees around, and it's really the luck of the draw which way the pieces come out," said John Goglia, a former member of the board and an aircraft maintenance expert. If the parts fly off in flight and hit the wing, where fuel is stored, or the fuselage, he said, "the results could be pretty devastating."
The first such engine explosion occurred in July 1989, during a flight of a United Airlines DC-10. That engine was mounted in the tail, and the debris disabled the plane's hydraulic system. The crew brought the aircraft down in a field at the airport in Sioux City, Iowa, maneuvering only by varying the thrust on the two surviving engines; 111 people were killed.
The explosion in Los Angeles is similar to one in September 2000 involving another Boeing 767, this one owned by US Airways, in Philadelphia. In both cases, mechanics were testing the engines by revving them toward full power when they broke up, leading to catastrophic fires.
In addition, an Air New Zealand 767 suffered an uncontained failure at 11,000 feet on a flight from Auckland, New Zealand, to Brisbane, Australia, in December 2002. That plane landed safely. But as a result, in March 2003, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections of the part involved. The agency believed that would solve the problem.
The engine in all the cases was a variation of the popular General Electric CF6.
Rick Kennedy, a spokesman for General Electric, said that about 3,400 of the engines were in service and that two-thirds of them had been inspected, with no problems found. The engine involved in Los Angeles was not due for inspection, according to investigators.
The inspection interval is usually set at half the number of flights at which engineers think a problem will develop. The inspection limit now is 11,000 "cycles," or engine start-ups and shutdowns. Aviation experts said that one likely outcome was that the government would require inspections at shorter intervals.
Mr. Kennedy said the engines involved were built between 1982 and 2001; in 2001, the company switched to a stronger disk, he said. The engines are used on a variety of large airliners.
The F.A.A. is investigating the failure in Los Angeles, said a spokeswoman, Laura J. Brown.
A spokesman for American, Tim Smith, said the airline's insurance company had not yet determined whether the plane in Los Angeles had been damaged beyond repair. It suffered damage to both engines and the fuselage, he said.
Of greater concern, though, is how to prevent the problem altogether.
Mr. Goglia said, "I view these as warning shots. If we don't pay attention and figure out what went wrong, we're going to repeat it."
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