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Comment by efraim | Hacker News Reader

This looks like it was a contained engine failure, even though the cowling fell off. A portion of a fan blade was embedded in the containment ring and the other damaged blades is missing but probably went out the front, slicing the cowling on its way.

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/ntsb/50971339066/in/album-7215... does not look contained.

You can't tell from that picture, the damage could have been sustained from the cowling. There is speculation that the damage is from a fan blade but that has not been determined yet. The video of the engine doesn't show any corresponding damage on the side where any fan blade could have exited either.

That's fair. I assume the logic here is that a dislodged cowling or other external engine paneling is traveling at a relatively low velocity when it makes contact with another part of the plane, compared to a fan blade which, if successfully ejected from the engine casing, would be traveling at a very high speed?

Cowling is not designed to hold the fan blades. There is a brown kevlar sheet around the fan that keeps the shrapnel in

Oh, so this is what my initial source was talking about. I guess we'll have to wait for the final NTSB report.

I can't quite tell how far back this is, but it's possible that the failure was contained, but the blade still departed out the back at an angle, and then hit the aircraft further back along the fuselage.

That's a composite fairing that just smooths out the join between the wing and the fuselage. It wouldn't take a lot to do damage to it, so a chunk of the cowling is pretty plausible here.

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