Comment by iwontberude
1 year ago
I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this was within earshot of a plane in a severe emergency and heard this particular sound and since turbine engines are already quite shrill I am basically just sorta confused who your audience is for this suggestion.
The RAT makes an extremely distinctive sound. You'd recognize it nearly instantly. However the RAT will not power everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzejbxNj1hY
That's cute, it sounds like a little Cessna
Usually, when the RAT is really deployed because of an emergency, the jet engines will be a lot more silent (because they're not producing any power). Although I'm not really sure how loud a windmilling jet engine really is, and I somehow doubt there is a YouTube video of a plane landing with both engines disabled - but you never know...
Indeed unlikely to hear RAT deployed due to emergency. But they do deploy it sometimes on test flights after maintenance.
Would you hear it from inside the plane? Even if it’s not as loud as the main engine, if it’s audible at all a lot of people would notice a change in pitch/tone. At least, I notice when the sounds the plane is making change even though I don’t know anything about the reason.
It's apparently quite loud
> After starting the descent, the flight crew made an announcement to the passengers; however, unbeknownst to the flight crew, the noise generated by the RAT (because of its high rotation speed) prevented the passengers and the cabin crew from hearing the announcement.
https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/187755
Oww. Seems they got lucky.
It always surprised me that there aren’t small, local lithium batteries to provide backup power for critical components like the smoke detectors. Is the risk of those catching fire considered too high?
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I feel like it's not the RAT you'll notice from inside the plane, it will be the silence from the engines. That combined with at least a momentary flicker of the lighting (I'm not sure if a RAT on a 787 will run cabin lighting but I doubt it), and you'll know.
Username does not check out.
Jokes aside... I'm certainly part of the intended audience: point me at an interesting rabbit hole, and there I gooo.
Haha I didn’t parse it that way but I can see how you thought that upon rereading. I just want to understand why we would hear the RAT when there wasn’t an emergency overhead. I supposed planes regularly test them?
They don’t.
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