Parts of the Air France A380 that had it’s right outboard engine blow up enroute over the Atlantic Ocean has been found in the snow of Greenland. Flight 66 (seems ominous), was enroute from Paris (CDG) to Los Angeles (LAX) and was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean when the right outboard engine had an ‘uncontained engine failure’ which caused separation of the engine cowling and blades from the main part of the engine.
With today’s tracking abilities on airplanes and how modern airplanes are tracked via diagnostic information investigators were able to pinpoint the exact location where the engine had its failure and deducing a pinpointed search area to look in.
On Oct 5th 2017 the BEA announced that following read out of the flight data recorder the position of the engine failure was identified about 81nm/150km southeast of Paamiut (Greenland). A helicopter of Air Greenland was dispatched on request by the Danish Havarikommission (HCL), overflew the area on Oct 4th 2017 and spotted the engine debris in an area covered with ice and desert at the West Coast.
After a day or two of searching they were actually able to find the debris in the snowy area of Paaniut, Greenland. It’s remarkable that they were able to find all of this debris and will likely aid in finding the source of the problem of the unconstrained engine failure that plagued the flight.
It will take time for a full report to come out about what actually happened to this plane. Investigations of aircraft malfunctions are usually very in-depth, especially when this is now the second occurrence of an engine failure like this with an A380. If this is a problem that is found in other A380s it could mean a grounding of the entire fleet of airplanes across the world.
For more information please visit The Aviation Herald.
