How A BRAND NEW Jet Almost Fell Out Of The Sky | Singapore Airlines Flight 836

hey guys quick announcement before we begin we're getting really close to 200k subscribers so if you enjoy the videos that I make hit that subscribe button help us get to 200k a lot sooner thank you now on to the video this is the story of Singapore Airlines flight 836. on the 23rd of May 2015 an Airbus A330 was on a flight from Singapore to Shanghai the plane that was making the flight today nine Victors Sierra Sierra foxtrot was a brand new A330 the airline had only taken delivery of the plane at the end of March that year so the plane wasn't even two months old when it took off for Shanghai the plane takes off and everything is going well soon the plane closes in on China specifically when the plane was 130 nautical miles Southeast of Hong Kong and the A330 was cruising at 39 000 feet as the plane was cruising on a heading of zero to eight degrees the pilots turned to their weather radar and they saw that they had some weather in the way to avoid the weather system the pilots decided to divert to the right to avoid the weather cells so the pilots talked to ATC and then they got a new heading of zero eight zero degrees as they vectored away the pilots were working on a way to avoid the absolute worst of the weather that was now in their way now they wanted to turn to the left to zero to zero degrees so the controller let them do that the pilots knew that they'd be in for a rough ride so they turned on the seat belt sign and made an announcement over the PA they then set the speed of the plane to 0.78 Mach which is the turbulence penetration speed that's set by Airbus just to be extra safe the pilots also turned on the NTI system and they selected continuous ignition on both engines these Pilots had prepped the plane as best as they could and now all they had to do was push through the zone of turbulence as the plane entered the weather cell the engines on the plane started to Surge the plane's electronic centralized aircraft monitoring system or the ecam lit up with error messages Engine 2 was going through a few surges the ecam then gave the pilots a list of things that they needed to do to get the situation under control they had to pull back engine number two all the way from Cruise power back to idle power but as the crew are going through that list they had a new problem to deal with engine number one was now surging the ecam now gave them a helpful list of actions that the pilots had to do on top of the actions that they already had to do but we know what the list would say shut engine number one down this would mean that an A330 with 192 people on board would have barely any power now the pilots had a choice keep one of the engines running and risk damaging it or shut both engines down and hope for the best with the left-hand engine surging the pilot shot engine number one down with engine number two at idle and engine number one shut down the plane could no longer keep station at 39 000 feet so the plane started to slowly lose altitude they were trying to stabilize the plane at 26 000 feet the pilots knew that they had to land This Plane as soon as possible they had options diapered the airport's closest to them were Hong Kong and Guangzhou but neither of those airports were easily reachable to get to those airports the pilots had to fly through another storm cell and they really didn't want to do that the pilots decided to stick it out and within some time the plane was getting close to gmn at this time the flight crew was trying to figure out what was working and what wasn't on their plane they were on the phone with Engineers on the ground at Shanghai to see what the best course of action was as all of this was unfolding the pilots were trying to get engine number one the engine on the left hand side of the plane going again as all of this happened the A330 had been losing altitude engine number one was shut down and engine number two was at idle flight 836 was slowly starting to slip towards the cold Waters of the South China Sea as the plane was at 26 000 feet the pilots managed to get engine number one back online power was cautiously restored to engine number two the A330 now had both of its engines back and the pilots hoped that whatever was going wrong with the engines didn't crop up for the rest of the flight having gotten both of their engines back and with their nearest airports being behind a wall of bad weather the pilots of flight 836 decided to press on to Shanghai as the plane approached its destination the pilots brought the plane lower and slowed it down the pilots did everything that they could to make sure that the problems that they had before didn't crop up during the landing losing power on Final Approach would pretty much Doom the plane but nothing of that sort happened flight 836 made an uneventful landing at Shanghai as soon as the passengers were deported from the airplane Engineers got to work trying to figure out why both engines on a modern passenger airliner would have problems at the exact same time jet engines have gotten so reliable that two engines on the same plane having issues at the same time is almost unheard of unless both engines somehow have the same problem as their root cause think things along the lines of a contaminated fuel supply or something like that on the ground the engineers subjected the engines to a battery of tests trying to figure out what had happened to them the first thing that they tried was a borescope inspection and that turned up nothing on both engines they then tried a full Authority digital engine control test and the engine passed those tests with flying colors they also checked the magnetic chip detectors in the engines to see if there was any buildup you see if some part of the engine is wearing away faster than usual then metal chips are introduced into the oil stream and the Magnetic chip detector as the name suggests detects those chips but in this case the detectors were clean nothing in the engine was experiencing any more wear than usual they then decided to run the engine on the ground and to carry out the high pressure compressor surge margin acceptance test wow that's a mouthful but the engines passed those tests with no issues whatsoever the engines were performing as per usual no matter what the engineers threw at them with the engines in pretty okay shape they decided to Ferry the plane back to Singapore where more thorough testing could be done to find what really went wrong with the engines once in Singapore the plane could technically be released back in the service if they replace both the engines with newer ones but Singapore Airlines was hesitant to do that because they had a policy against twin engine airplanes having two brand new engines after a swap so it was decided that engine number one would be taken off of the airplane and then sent to an overhaul facility where it would be stripped down and studied extensively as they were tearing the engine down they started to find this Gray colored dust deep in the engine specifically on the intermediate pressure compressor the intermediate pressure turbine and the high pressure turbine they found out that the dust was composed of aluminum and silicon looking at the materials that the engine was made up of they got to know that the abradable material and the intermediate pressure compressor or IPC was made up of the very two same materials as you know an engine has a bunch of turbines in it these turbines are encapsulated in a shell or a casing of sorts the casing has these grooves in them that the blades can move through to make the engine as efficient as possible the space between the casing grooves and the blades must be minimized this is to lower the backflow of air which can reduce efficiency of the engine so the grooves are filled with an abradable material that the blades can sort of rub up against when they looked at the rotor paths they saw that the abradable lining was making a lot of contact with the rotors when the engine was in motion but this was only on stages 3 and 6. all the other stages showed normal wear and tear with that the investigators had an idea as to what caused all of the problems on flight 836 stages 3 and 6 of the intermediate pressure compressor was making more contact with the operatable material than was expected this released a fine dust of aluminum and silicon into the engine eventually the dust made it deep enough into the engine that the dust ignited and the engine disrupting the airflow the disruption of the airflow caused multiple surges in the engine the eec or the electronic engine controller was programmed to detect surges and recover from them so when the surges happened the eec would pull back power and then when the surges were gone it would reinstate power which caused the surges to happen again this is why both engines experience surges back to back to back but with all of that we still have one final question to answer why do the blades and the braidable material come into contact well more than usual that is well we don't know the exact answer for that question but we have a few good theories one is that the case of the engine shrunk when it came into contact with ice crystals and super cooled water that was sucked into the engine I mean the weather that flight 836 was flying through was perfect for this sort of thing to happen another theory is that the rotor stretched just a tiny bit when they were spinning around in the engine or the rotors could have been vibrating just a bit that caused them to make contact with the casing well for whatever reason contact was made and that nearly took out two engines of an A330 in your opinion which is the most likely scenario let me know your thoughts and the comments below after this accident Singapore Airlines decided that on all of its newly delivered a330s one engine would be replaced with an older engine that was well more worn in that in my opinion is quite ironic an older part being added for reliability reasons you don't see that a whole lot usually it's the other way around not many plants can claim to have almost lost both its engines while flight A36 can and she lived to tell the tale thank you for watching this episode of mini air crash investigation if you like the videos that I make do consider liking and subscribing it will really help the channel grow I will catch you guys next time stay safe

Channel: Mini Air Crash Investigation

Views: 267,573

Keywords: air crash investigation, why planes crash, aviation safety, planes, singapore airlines, singapore airlines flight 836, powerless over the pacific, mayday, air crash investiation 2023, singapore airlines airbus a330, plane crash over the pacific, no engines over the pacific, aviation, singapore changi airport, plane crash, airbus a330, airbus a330 crash, flight simulator, flight simulator 2020, mentour pilot, theflightchannel

Id: -ViAs1LaVvQ

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023