Speedbird 2276 Heavy Reporting Catastrophic Engine Failure

In a letter handed to passengers at the hotel, BA apologised for the incident, saying: “We do not underestimate how distressing the experience has been for you and we have a dedicated team here to help you.”

It would have been equally appropriate for British Airways to have announced, our crackerjack professionals perfectly executed the procedures to keep you alive in the face of a major emergency and the worst injury was a blister on the backside from sliding down the escape ramp.

The incident was a British Airways aircraft at Las Vegas which suffered an engine failure as it was preparing for take-off.  This required emergency evacuation of the aircraft but there were minimal injuries despite the fact of a Boeing 777 in flames.  (The Guardian:  British Airways plane catches fire at Las Vegas airport)

It's not clear from the reports where in the take-off procedure the aircraft was at the time of the failure.  If they were coming up to take-off speed on the runway, then the efforts of the flight crew are even more impressive as that would have been one hell of a dangerous abort when one engine is blown.

To review, the aircraft will fly from Las Vegas to London so those fuel tanks were full to gushing.  The Boeing 777 has two engines and it can fly on one but I hugely doubt it can take off and climb out on one.  No-one here is a pilot but we suspect that would be a huge problem to abort because the pilots presumably cannot use the thrust reversers when one engine is out or that will crash the aircraft too.

So, hat tip to BA for a perfectly-executed recovery procedure regardless of where in the take-off sequence it took place.  Many of you probably know how long it takes to get the passengers on-board an aircraft of that size so the effort to get all back off as quickly as possible without injury while the aircraft is burning is absolutely magnificent.


There's some British understatement in the title for The Guardian.  'BA plane catches fire at the Las Vegas airport.'  Well, yes.  All of that is true.  It was a BA aircraft.  It did catch fire.  It was at Las Vegas.  Right.

There are various estimates for how fast the turbines spin in a jet motor with some as high as twenty-six thousand RPM.  When something spinning that fast breaks, it doesn't just catch fire, it explodes.  That's why there's such massive containment hardware around each motor, ideally it's good if those those zillions of little exploding bits don't end up in the fuel tanks in the wings or (cough) in you.