United Airlines grounds all Boeing 777s after engine failure dropped debris on Broomfield

999 dinesh 999 United Airlines grounded all of its Boeing 777s on Sunday after one plane experienced an engine failure and spewed debris over a northern Denver suburb this weekend. The airline’s voluntary decision came as the Federal Aviation Administration said it plans to order increased safety inspections for the type of engine involved, which uses a unique hollow fan blade. Two of those blades were fractured, the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday after an initial investigation, and several blades were damaged. “We reviewed all available safety data following yesterday’s incident,” FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said in a statement. “Based on the initial information, we concluded that the inspection interval should be stepped up for the hollow fan blades that are unique to this model of engine, used solely on Boeing 777 airplanes.” The uncontained right engine failure on United Airlines Flight 328 happened just minutes after the Hawaii-bound Boeing 777-200 took off from Denver International Airport on Saturday afternoon. No one on the plane or on the ground was injured. Twenty-four of United Airlines’ Boeing 777 planes with Pratt & Whitney 4000 series engines will be temporarily grounded until the airline and federal regulators can ensure the planes meet safety standards, United Airlines said in a statement. Three aviation experts told The Denver Post on Sunday that the blades, which spin rapidly inside the engine, were a potential culprit for the engine failure — though they cautioned that they can only speculate on the cause, and that it was too soon to know whether poor maintenance, old age or an external force — like a bird — contributed to the problem. The plane that failed over Broomfield had been flying since 1995 and was certified by the FAA through 2022, according to federal records. The model is a “very reliable older airplane,” aviation safety expert John Cox told The Post, and uncontained engine failures like what happened over Broomfield are rare. The NTSB said Sunday that while the engine was severely damaged, the rest of the plane escaped relatively unscathed. It will take months for the board to determine what caused the failure, but they said one fan blade fractured near the root and another broke at its midpoint United Airlines has a total of 52 Boeing 777s in its fleet, but 28 are not in use. The airline said in its statement that it will swap out other planes for the grounded 777s and expects the move will inconvenience a “small number of customers.” The FAA’s directives means Boeing 777s in other airlines’ fleets may be removed from service due to increased inspections, Dickson said. Details of the order, which was not immediately issued Sunday evening, were not available. The Boeing 777 model already is being phased out among a few large airlines throughout the world, including Qatar Airways, Nippon Airways, Japan Airlines and Emirates. In May, Delta announced it was retiring all 18 of its Boeing 777 planes in favor of newer, more fuel-efficient aircraft. Well-maintained planes can fly safely for more than 40 years, Cox said. And while the coronavirus pandemic has led to layoffs and furloughs in the airline industry, those shortages would not change what aircraft maintenance is required, according to Ross Aimer, a retired United Airline pilot and CEO of Aero Consulting Experts. “It doesn’t change the particular procedures that have to be done on the engine,” Aimer said. “It would take longer with fewer people, but they don’t skip it because of fewer people.” Broomfield Police Department 911 operators were inundated with descriptions of the incident, according to 911 calls released Sunday. Operators eventually began answering the phone with: “911, are you calling about the airplane accident?” People told them things like “Oh my god,” and said there were “parts everywhere, literally falling all over the city” and  “there was a small boom.” One woman told an operator that “a piece of it just flew, just landed right in front of me … it almost landed on my head. … do you want me to pick this thing up?” To the last question, the operator told the woman, “Nope, leave it where it’s at for now, thank you.” Mike Robertson, a retired FAA inspector and Army pilot who reviewed photos and videos of the incident, said the root cause of a failure could have happened between the rigorous, frequent inspections that planes undergo — like if a rock got into the engine between flights. In that case, he said, the failure would not be considered a maintenance issue. Or a budding crack could have been missed during an inspection, which would be a maintenance issue, though Robertson cautioned he didn’t know what happened in this case. Even a tiny flaw in the engine can cause massive problems, Aimer said. “When it turns at that speed, with the slightest imbalance it basically tears itself apart,” he said. Cox said that pilots and flight crews train for this type ofsituat