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Comment by agloeregrets | Hacker News Reader

Which, to pinpoint the insanity of the FAA, the failure seen over denver actually involved an uncontained blade exiting the engine, something it was clearly not designed to allow to happen. It's a mess.

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But the engine did contain the failure. No pieces of the engine caused any functional damage to the rest of the aircraft. The housing is designed to prevent shrapnel damage, not to prevent stuff from falling out altogether.

What's insane about the FAA's approach? They are ordering immediate inspections of all fan blades in these engines for cracks like the one that apparently brought this one down.

Not fully contained. See https://twitter.com/breakingavnews/status/136379347594735616... for damage to wing to body fairing.

There certainly was shrapnel damage to the plane. http://avherald.com/img/united_b772_n772ua_denver_210220_8.j...

Contained vs uncontained turbine failures relate to the damage from the blades being contained, which in this case they were. Contained failures still result in engine parts exiting the engine, but not through the engine case, which is reinforced to contain the turbine blades in a failure. The unexpected issue here is that the cowling was knocked off, which is not supposed to happen, but in recent years it seems to be happening.

It was not contained. A blade went though the lower wing root.

https://twitter.com/breakingavnews/status/136379347594735616...

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