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  u1hcw9nx
  Turbine disk failure is one thing that can down a plane, and you can only reduce the probability so much.Fan blades and turbine blades can be contained by containment cases if they break off, but turbine disks can't. When a disk breaks, it's an uncontained engine failure. A 20 kg disk fragment flying at Mach 1 goes through everything.Airframes are have a 30-degree fragment spread cone around every disk stage. Airframes are designed so that no single fragment can destroy all redundant systems at once in this zone (flight controls, fuel lines, and hydraulic systems). Jet fuel cannot be stored in the wings in this zone.
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  realo
  Catastrophic failure? CheckPlane landed without casualties? CheckPlane design so good it helped avoid casualties? CheckHum... Ah! Not an american Boeing but a french Airbus. Of course.The article mentions this story should make everyone a little less afraid of flying.Sure, as long as its not on a Boeing plane.
• CursedSilicon
  One of my favourite memories of flying Qantas when I was younger was the inflight entertainment.If memory serves, they were celebrating some sort of milestone like "60 years without a fatal accident" or similar. Quite an impressive feat!I'm unclear if it was directly related. But the Qantas inflight entertainment system on our flight from Sydney to Los Angeles meanwhile contained about 12 seasons of the National Geographic series "Air Crash Investigation" (Mayday: Air Disasters for Americans)I will admit that show made an 18 hour slog of a flight significantly more enjoyable
• exceptione
  > The detailed software allowed them to enter various parameters including the weather, runway condition, and any systems failures, and then calculate whether it was possible to land. But when everything had been entered, the program spit out an unhelpful answer: “no result.” > When calculating the landing distance, the software applied a generic “operational coefficient” to account conservatively for variations in pilot techniques that could result in less efficient deceleration. The problem, as investigators would later discover, was that the software applied the coefficient again whenever another system failure was added. With so many system failures on the aircraft, the coefficient was applied a total of 9 times, resulting in a calculated landing distance considerably greater than the length of the available runway. However, Check Captain Evans was able to fix the problem by manually entering their actual landing weight, overriding the program’s assumption of a maximum landing weight. By specifying a landing weight in excess of the maximum, the system logic changed to apply the operational coefficient only once — for unrelated and obscure reasons — and lo and behold, when he ran the numbers this time, the computer said they could just barely land on any of the 4,000-meter runways at Singapore Changi Airport, with only 100 meters to spare. This reeks so much of if-then-else programming as opposed to making a well-typed conceptual model computable.
• seemaze
  This remarkable event, along with the an accessible history of the evolution of precision manufacturing is covered in Simon Winchester's excellent book The Perfectionists[0]. The audiobook is narrated by the author, which is quite enjoyable as well.[0]https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-perfectionists-si...
• dnw
  Also this documentary is very good: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nZS-mkygGWI
• polishdude20
  I wonder why the engineers didn't specify a tolerance for thickness of the oil stub pipe?
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  gnuplustoejam
  Unbelievably comprehensive coverage from the Aviation Herald on this incident below, the owner of which was sued recently over a report to the point he sadly lost his home of over 40 years:https://avherald.com/h?article=43309c6d&opt=0
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  adaml_623
  "Even the airplane itself ultimately survived: after a marathon repair that lasted 535 days and cost $139 million, the A380 Nancy-Bird Walton triumphantly returned to the skies in 2012."This quote amazes me. My understanding is that Airbus, Qantas, and probably Rolls Royce were willing to spend this much because it meant that the incident was not a "hull loss" and therefore not as bad a hit to reputation and safety statistics. Does anyone know if that's true?
• ChrisArchitect
  Title is: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32 (2023)Some discussion:2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586773
• anon
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  Alien1Being
  Qantas is a troubled airline. Once a Qantas aircraft technician even told me that Singapore Airlines have a far superior maintenance schedule for their aircraft.This person claims that he tells his family to avoid flying on Qantas ( but flies on it himself since he gets free flights)These days Han airlines ( SIA, Cathay,China Eastern) and Middle Eastern airlines (Emirates,Qatar) are far better than Western Airlines ( American, British, Lufthansa, KLM,Qantas).
• libraryofbabel
  I once heard someone describe Admiral Cloudberg's air crash investigation blog as "the best thing on the Internet" and I still think that might be true. She is a great researcher and a superb writer, which stands out all the more these days in these fallen times of load-bearing AI slop. Her blog is beloved of both aviation geeks and, for obvious reasons, SREs (and other engineers).She recently posted what's basically her magnum opus, on the Potomac river midair collision.[0] It's the length of a short book. I'm working my way through it; I'm taking a flight today, and I'll probably read it on the plane tonight.This article, on how an A380 with 469 souls aboard almost crashed, but didn't, is one of her best. I like it because it's a happy ending, and a story of the combined effects of good engineering design (the astonishing degree of redundancy built into the A380 proved just enough to prevent catastrophe), and human troubleshooting under pressure in the cockpit by some smart people with vast experience who remained calm throughout. (Another favorite article of her, on the Air France 447 crash, tells the exact opposite story: poor systems design combined with pilots basically losing the most basic ability to aviate in the heat of the moment. That one is a much darker read.[1])[0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/reaping-the-whirlwind-in... [1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
• bookofjoe
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511213