MinggeJS
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They might mean what I was talking about before - the airspeed-powered hydraulic pump and generator. I looked it up - it's called a RAT. Just for you. The full name is a ram air turbine.
Pretty sure 747s don't have those. Maybe a -8?
RATs are really cute, BTW. They're like little tiny wind turbines that pop out of a hatch when the plane's in trouble:
(That's a RAT on a 777. Not sure why it's deployed in that shot.)
Point of order. The 747 in question didn't have a RAT; in fact, only the Dreamliner-era ones (10/2011 and later) do. It was probably a jet fuel turbine in the forward wheel well.
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it's a running gas turbine not a battery, and it's compressing air to run the air conditioning and start the other engines
Ehhhhhh okay fine, when I saw "auxiliary power unit" I assumed it meant electrical power but compressed air is power too. It's at least close enough that my description worked okay as an analogy. Thanks for the more detailed explanation, though.
The ground crew are going to be aware of what's going on when the first engine is started (also because it appears the airline is cheap and most of their planes are busted so this isn't so abnormal). They're not going to be anywhere near it.
Well, one would certainly think so.
At a minimum, the full story probably involves a lax safety regime and general complacence.
You think?
why do they even allow the operation of jets without an APU? That seems extremely dangerous.
Because beyond the inconvenience on the ground, it makes very little difference to the operation of the aircraft.
The description of the ground operation sounded pretty dangerous to me. Partly just because it sounded like the normal procedure ensured that none of the ground crew need to be near the aircraft when the engines are starting or after they're running, and the backup procedure does not.
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The description of the ground operation sounded pretty dangerous to me. Partly just because it sounded like the normal procedure ensured that none of the ground crew need to be near the aircraft when the engines are starting or after they're running, and the backup procedure does not.
When I have flown, the engines are usually started during push-back, while the ground technician is still standing near the cockpit and the driver is still on the push-back cart. I imagine that while they're all paying attention and don't get too close it's quite safe. Like I said, there seems to be more to this story than the article states, and I doubt the non-funtional nature of the APU made much difference to the outcome.
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Even if they are, those engines don't start or rev up very quickly. Why didn't he move away quickly enough when the first engine was throttled up or the second started, whichever ate him?
That was my question when I read the article, too.
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Whatever, point is: near-simultaneous all-engine shutdowns have happened before. For reasons other than fuel starvation.
Like:
I saw that on the Smithsonian Channel series Air Disasters (noted at bottom of article also). Air Disasters is a really cool show - it's a 1 hour show that dramatizes what happened and follows that up with a detailed examination of what went wrong and why. And often, what was done to prevent it from happening again.
TACA Flight 110 - Wikipedia
