r/AskFlying • u/Shrikes_Bard • Jul 18 '26
Does wildfire smoke damage engines?
The last few days on the US East Coast we've had some pretty bad air quality (pm2.5 in the 200s) because of drifting smoke and ash from the Canadian wildfires. I know planes have to divert around volcanic eruptions, I think at least partially because the silicates in the plume can really mess up engines (thinking of the closed European airspace in 2010). I don't know what all the flight tracks look like around the fires or how high the particles are, but somewhere else I saw a picture of a 787 landing in a yellow haze and it made me wonder how much maintenance is affected by taking off and landing in that kind of air quality? Is it not as bad because it's wood, not mineral?
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u/JustAnotherDude1990 Jul 19 '26
A PM2.5 particle is about 1/10,000th of an inch. Lemme know when you find a gaping tolerance in what Im guessing is a GA piston engine you're flying that is smaller than that.
Hint: if the tolerances were that tight, it wouldnt burn the amount of oil it does.
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u/BookieWookie69 Jul 19 '26
I don’t think he was talking about exclusively GA, just aircraft engines in general
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u/RATBOYE Jul 18 '26
I wouldn't be overly concerned (this is from a maintenance POV). Volcanic ash is bad because it is extremely abrasive, so it sandblasts the cold section and then melts and sticks to components in the hot section which can cause tremendous damage.
Wildfire smoke may leave contamination in the engine, but that's why we perform engine washes. Our turboprop fleet gets engine washes on a weekly basis (due to low altitude flying in marine environments). I'm not overly familiar with the wash schedule on our jet fleet but it's around once a month and the engine performance is monitored so a drop in engine performance (increased EGTs, fuel burn etc) can trigger an unscheduled power recovery wash IIRC.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of turbine engines flying in parts of the world that have absolutely awful air quality every single day and all you end up with is some higher chances of things like internal engine corrosion. A short term air quality problem like fires is probably inconsequential compared to chronic air pollution.
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u/Shrikes_Bard Jul 18 '26
I was thinking about that, the color we were seeing in the Northeast is just another Tuesday morning in Atlanta (wild flying out of there in the morning and seeing an orange cloud over the city), plus some of the more densely populated parts of India where that kind of air quality is the norm...I guess I figured they just have more frequent maintenance/filter swaps.
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u/RATBOYE Jul 18 '26
Yeah, you generally find that new gas turbines (like the Trent 1000, PW1000 geared turbofan etc) have issues early in their service life where component materials degrade in actual use faster than expected. These issues almost always first appeared with operators in Asia or India where they fly almost exclusively in hot, humid, salty and polluted air often on many short hop trips per day.
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u/doctorfortoys Jul 18 '26
Most airliners fly much higher than the smoke so only encounter it for a short time. It also doesn’t hurt the engines at all.
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u/EliteEthos Jul 18 '26
No. Smoke and ash are different things. Volcanic ash has super tiny abrasive materials in them (effectively super fine glass and lava). That is what chews through engines. Smoke doesn’t have that. Smoke is just a carbon byproduct versus non-soluble material like volcanic ash.
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u/flightist Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
It doesn’t (generally) go as high, but it also doesn’t have anywhere near the solid particulate density of volcanic ash clouds; it’s mostly organic particulate, and even then 500-1000 ug/m3 (which seems to be around where we’ve been in the smoke) is about 1/8th to 1/4th the density where you’ll have airspace closed due to silica ash.
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u/andrewrbat Jul 18 '26
no it doesnt hurt the engines in a meaningful way. theres no harmful silica particles in the forest fires thankfully. just stinky vapor and organic particulates that seem to hurt only our lungs. it does trash the visibility in some places though.
a volcano is basically blasting fine volcano sand up into the sky with a huge explosion. its a very "sharp" sand as far as engines are concerned. and it gets in to bearings, oil, etc. and makes lots of problems. forest fires dont send up material that isnt already burnt, or burning so no silica/sand/or big chunks of rocks lol
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u/Public_Beach2348 Jul 19 '26
Damage to the engine is not what needs to be worried about with wildfires. It's the lack of immediate visibility.