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guido411 said:It's not pushed under the rug, it's on the NTSB website as under investigation. Company has a new procedure for boost pumps and engine anti-ice on at TOD. NTSB said to be concentrating on environmental factors, not fuel.
dime line said:And in both glider incidents the motors quit at throttle retard.
Nixon said:Well then, just pull them back one at a time! That was easy!
RNObased said:With pax on board???? Brilliant idea........ NOT
RNObased said:So you are telling me that the engine heats come on at TOD no matter what the conditions???? If that is so, it sounds like a knee jerk reaction of the first order??? How is that going to help anything if you are flying along in clear air??? Or is there more to the story?????
qblzr said:=why would you pull the throttles back to idle anyway just to put on engine heat?
guido411 said:RNO,
Good assesment, "knee-jerk" is the tradional Flight Options reaction, and yes, EVERY TOD when above FL300 for more than 30 mins is what the mandate says. I can't say it hurts to put the boost pumps on, or the ignitors for that matter. So besides burning up more ignitors I guess it's no skin off my back.
I am not type in the Beechjet, nor have I flown (in the front) for 5 years.. but let me introduce you to Occam's Razor: Occam was a 13th century monk who believed that scientific explanations should always focus on the explanation that requires THE LEAST amount of assumptions... given the fact that other incidents have occured other places within the US, would it not point to something very basic with the airplane, that is perhaps also related to an event at TOD? How many other (documented or known) incidents are there? It would seem that fuel heaters are the first place to look / focus, no? The methane seems like the last place we should be looking, or am I missing other flameouts over this Florida coastal zone?Hobbes said:nope...and it is flammable...but I have watched several times on Discovery channel where they were researching a flight of 5 Navy WWII era fighters that went down in the same area just of the east coast of FL. Well, they got a radial engine of the type from these planes, and put it on a test cell. They ran it and when they would get to a concentration of about 0.95% methane in the air they were giving it for combustion, the thing would just shut down. Methane in the air makes the density of a given air pocket much less and I think that has to do with the adverse combustion properties when it is loose in the atmosphere...anyways...I know it sounds out there, but seriously man...I am not talking about UFOs and crop circles here...I am talking about a phenomenon we KNOW occurs...The show on Discovery also had footage of actual leaks of methane from the sea floor in this area, and also how footage from aloft of a methane pocket surfacing...
Now, if you give me some other reason why those engines quit..no problem...I don't have any reason to want this to be true...but this is what I truly believe happened to that beechjet, and also the 3 other jet engines that flamed out in the vicinity in the same hour.
The most important thing is that the crew dead sticked that one in safely...and kudos to them...just another reason those folks at Flops need a raise...they are truly underpaid now.
ah.. that is a good point (the concentration of failures)..but still .. i have a hard time believing you'd get enough gas at 30,000 feet to be a problem...Hobbes said:well...within 1 hour, and within a 100 nm radius....5 jet engines flamed out. 5. And you think both of these engines on the beechjet flamed out because of something on the aircraft? I cannot see how probability would even allow one to think that there wasn't a strong external circumstance which caused these flameouts.
Also....the first time Flops had a dual engine flameout, it was over the gulf....hmmmm....never over kansas...or colorado in the middle of the continent but always right along the coastline.
I know most people think this is crackpot....but right now, I think methane ingestion is what happened. I think 691TA was in the densest area of concentration, and the other aircraft were possibly in an area where the gas was more dispersed and that is why it only flamed out one of their motors....