Comment by loeg

12 hours ago

That's why it flipped upwards, but not why it flipped towards the body of the plane / to the right.

Yes, and that lateral movement is very important since the debris seems to have caused at least one other engine to the right to fail as well.

  • From a failure analysis perspective that is much less relevant though. The first failure was the rear engine mount if it had been a secondary failure it would have been deformed first and then broken, and it clearly is not. It just tore in half on one of the four connections and then the rest deformed slightly due to overstress.

    • It was however relevant to the survivability of the accident: if the left engine wouldn't have detached, or would have detached in a more "manageable" way, the other engine (probably the tail engine from how it looks) wouldn't have been affected too, and the pilots would have had a better chance to take off. Plus the whole "when an engine detaches, it shouldn't start a fire in the wing it was attached to" part of course...

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