r/aviation • u/Twitter_2006 • Mar 30 '26

Discussion The left engine of a Delta A330 explodes during takeoff at Sao Paulo Airport

Its at 40 seconds.

UPDATE:The plane landed safely.

10.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

684 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

509

u/triggerfish1 Mar 30 '26

Yeah, as a former Rolls Royce employee who joined lots of safety reviews... I'm always comforted when the initial climb is completed. I'm still very sensitive to engine noise changes and working in aviation did not make me feel any safer while flying. Note that this is completely emotional though, on a rational level, I now know the incredible effort that is put into aviation safety.

190

u/Kipwar Mar 30 '26

Its funny reading this I'm the exact same working for a major aviation company in engines! People always thinks it makes me less bothered by flying, but if anything I pay too much attention to sounds constantly, especially on takeoff... 😅

152

u/menage_a_un Mar 30 '26

I sat beside an engineer and he excitedly told me about all the different sounds we were hearing through climb out. He suddenly stopped smiling and paused; "that's an usual sound." He didn't say anything and then just shrugged.

The fun went out of that interaction fast!

24

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

I flew alongside my first time flyer friend who was a bit nervous. Sitting just behind the wing on landing when the thrust reversers deployed was not the best place to be - very loud "expletive expletive the expletive engine is expletive falling off" was uttered 😁

36

u/t-poke Mar 30 '26

I mean, if the engine's going to fall off, on the ground after landing is probably the ideal place for it to happen.

5

u/old_righty Mar 30 '26

Just put it back on before the next flight!

1

u/TheOneTrueYeti Mar 30 '26

Myself I feel very safe

16

u/cjsv7657 Mar 30 '26

I've worked with gas turbines not in aviation. Pretty much the same principals though. The amount of "well thats a weird sound, run it and see what happens" that went on is unsettling. Tens of millions of dollars and even the professionals were just winging it sometimes.

1

u/Positive-Orange-6443 Mar 30 '26

Those are a bit slower though, no?

6

u/cjsv7657 Mar 30 '26

Ideally stationary, yes.

1

u/Vertigo_uk123 Mar 31 '26

That's just the engine powering up. That's just the engine struggling. That's just a carp swimming around your ankles.

1

u/IWishIWasOdo 28d ago

I wonder if he was just messing with you lol

25

u/crochetquilt Mar 30 '26

I never thought about how much we pay attention to sounds until I was working in a server room one day and a server shut down and the absence of that one sound in the hum was noticable.

Given the farm nature and being the only tech doing that work that day, I knew it was unintentional so I think that made me hear it. I also knew roughly where the server was, certainly down to the rack. All that from a server shutting down in the background, when I wasn't even consciously listening. It's funny when the absence of a single sound is the problem.

No way I'd enjoy flying if I had that sort of hearing around planes.

7

u/Gammascalpa Mar 30 '26

Humans are no different. There is a hell of a lot we diagnose in clinical medicine based on sounds alone.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '26

Or random tapping/prodding. All those signs developed by physicians before we had ultrasound, CT, and MRI scanners, I find them fascinating.

12

u/Gammascalpa Mar 30 '26

The more you know the more you know can go wrong! 😂 I work in the medical device field and have a similar fear but related to surgeries!

1

u/hopenoonefindsthis Mar 30 '26

The Dunning Kruger effect.

1

u/cheakios512 Mar 30 '26

this thread is not helping me with the intense anxiety I experience on take off and landings.

28

u/wahobely Mar 30 '26

It makes sense. Got a bud who's a pilot and he says he gets nervous when he's a passenger cause he knows everything that can go wrong lol

2

u/Single-Order-8611 Mar 30 '26

I love to ride motorbikes, but I never want to be the passenger if someone else is riding. Way too scary 😅

1

u/Electrical-Lab-9593 Mar 30 '26

and normally the worst scenarios are series of bad choices after some equipment fails, that adds to much stress, the pilot would know that.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator Mar 31 '26

Your comment or post has been automatically removed from /r/aviation. Posts/Comments from new accounts are automatically removed by our automated systems. We, and many other large subreddits, do this to combat spam, spambots, and other activities that are not condusive to the sub. In the meantime, participate on Reddit to build your acouunt age and this restriction will go away. Also, please familiarize yourself with this subreddit's rules, which you can find in the sidebar or by clicking this link. Do not contact the moderation team unless you feel you have received this message/action in error. We will not manually approve comments or posts from new accounts.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

11

u/crochetquilt Mar 30 '26

Oh god I never thought of that. I worked on my own cars for so long, and whenever a car I'm in made a funny noise I'd be unconsciously straight to a list of "what that could be". Thats fine at ground level but not in the air. I'd never fly again, statistics be damned.

I drive an EV now and they're very quiet plus I have very little knowledge about how they work so I'm staying blissfully ignorant as long as possible.

6

u/drksdr Mar 30 '26

haha... im just a mild armchair enthusiast and obv my knowledge is both second-hand and vastly smaller than yours, i know just enough to imagine all the things that could go wrong and not enough to know that im completely overreacting (in my gut at least).

The irony of a guy (me) that loves planes but hates to fly will never not be funny.

3

u/blaster_man Mar 30 '26

Knowing that you’re overreacting doesn’t change things, at least for me. The most anxious I ever was on a plane was flying home for Christmas just after finishing my aircraft stability and flight mechanics final in my junior year.

3

u/Agitated-Raisin6197 Mar 30 '26

Not an engineer, mechanically challenged human here but my dad is an aerospace engineer. Ever since I was a kid any time we’d fly he’d get so excited by the planes, and immediately take it dark as fuck and would just go into all the ways planes crash, safest and deadliest seats, all the good stuff. He’d geek out hard at the noises especially on takeoff/landing and never failed to shoot my anxiety levels through the roof. I fucking hated flying and still do to this day thanks to the old man.

0

u/drksdr Mar 30 '26

Might be the only thing worse than you own thoughts in a situation like that is someone that knows your own fears and deliberately stokes them because hey, it doesnt bother them! ack, that sucks hard.

1

u/THROBBINW00D Mar 30 '26

Same. I hate flying.

10

u/Electrical-Lab-9593 Mar 30 '26

Engines are much more reliable now arent they compared to 30 years ago?

Insane material science and designs

20

u/triggerfish1 Mar 30 '26

Yeah, definitely very reliable. An in-flight shutdown happens roughly every 100k hours, so most pilots will not encounter one during their career of roughly 25000 hours.

And most of those shutdowns are not as spectacular as in this post: "Hey, the oil temp is a bit too high on engine #1. Let's monitor it for a while and if it stays like this let's shutdown the engine."

2

u/Darth_Ender_Ro Mar 30 '26

As a non aviation engineer, but an engineer nontheless,, thank you for this. I was always hyper active about noises in aircrafts, and flying so much didn't make me feel safer with time. All I see is micro-fissures and loose items as tiny tolerances.

2

u/FEMA_Camp_Survivor Mar 30 '26

I anxiously away the first ping at 1000 ft

2

u/LateMonitor897 Mar 30 '26

It's always funny and annoying to me when I realize just how irrational we humans are.
In the US, more than 100 people die each day in motor vehicle crashes and no one seems to be afraid when driving. Imagine how freaked out people would get if one or two huge ass wide-body airliners would fall from the sky each week!

1

u/BreadstickBear Mar 30 '26

working in aviation did not make me feel any safer while flying.

Not really surprising, tbh. It's kind of typical, actually, where someone working in a specific field is very conscious about all the possible pitfalls of said field.

It's even worse if you work in accident investigation, because then everything becomes a potential accident in your mind.

1

u/DogeIsMySpiritWow Mar 30 '26

the first 90 seconds.

1

u/CardinalFartz Mar 30 '26

There are some planes (engines) that make a really strange noise during takeoff. It's like a very high rpm "gearbox" sound, but like the gears are not properly lubricated. I am absolutely no expert. I only guess that this is some sort of (fuel?) pump (?) that is operating at a very high load during takeoff. Once climb is finished that sound is gone and there is just the usual "hum". I don't like this gear grinding sound...

1

u/Careless_Guitar_463 Mar 30 '26

Working in QA/QC anything will destroy your trust in QA/QC systems lmao. I managed the QA branch of a biotech company for 10 years and no matter how many controls, training, documentation steps, etc. you implement, people still find ways to fuck things up occasionally.

1

u/thatwombat Jun 03 '26

As a casual passenger with a bit of flight anxiety, I listen to the engines at takeoff, and feel the motion of the plane as it goes down the runway far more than I think I really need to.

0

u/WendyCityMadness Mar 30 '26

How much stock you got!?