There is not a lot of information to go on yet on the crash in Queens. That said, I am just as capable of making a fool of myself as the next pundit, so I will proceed to do so.
My instructor once told me, “What is the most dangerous part of a flight? Takeoff. The runway is behind you.” What was true of a single engine Cessna is biblical for a heavy multiengine transport. Losing an engine on takeoff means a loss of power just when you need it the most. You are trying to climb out in a high angle noise-abatement attitude. Suddenly you don’t have the power to sustain that and you are heading for a stall. Even worse, you have an asynchronous thrust and a torque that even full opposing rudder might not be able to counteract. This is especially true for a plane with two very powerful wing pylon mounted engines. When one engine stops running, your airplane wants to stop climbing and do a wingover. That’s probably what happened at O’Hare a decade or more ago when a DC-10 did just that. A DC-10 has 4 engines so one would think it might have been able to recover. But there is yet a third problem in a case like today.
Engines do fall off airplanes from time to time. Pylons are designed to break away in the worst case. But that only helps in a more normal failure, not a catastrophic failure. There is every chance that at the very instant your airplane wants to do a wingover and head straight for the ground, you will have lost all or most of your hydraulics on one side. Airplanes that size are controlled by hydraulics; the hydraulic pressure is supplied by a smaller jet engine called an Auxiliary Power Unit. I’m sure you’ve heard of APU’s on the space shuttle. Well, airliners have them too. They supply the high pressure required to move ailerons and such. If you lose pressure, you can’t control the airplane. There is redundancy, but if you’ve just lost a big chunk of aeroplane… you are toast.
It’s doubtful even a computer fly-by-wire system could have dealt with it. You can fly an airplane with control surfaces and no power or with power and no control surfaces. But if you’ve lost both?
This all begs the real question. Was it or wasn’t it? There was certainly no terrorist inside the airplane. Believe me, there is no button that says “Jettison Engine”. If reports of fire on one side during takeoff were true, then it is either a terrible accident or sabotage before the takeoff. If the problems did not show until the aircraft was off the runway, it is either a engine fault, ingestion of a Pterosaur-sized avian, sabotage… or a Stinger up the exhaust pipe.
I’m sure that someone in high places will know very soon. Personally I think it was an accident. We’ll know soon enough. The signs of a Stinger induced failure should be rather unmistakeable if present.
