"John Gaquin" wrote in message
news

"Maxx." wrote in message .

How much water can these engines suck in before they start to foul out?

An awful lot. Years ago there was an accident involving a Southern
Airways DC9 that inadvertently flew into a very large cell and flamed out
both engines with water and hail ingestion [in truth, I can't recall if
that was determined or theorized.]. "Landed" dead-stick on a road, I
think Many killed. That's the only one I can recall off the top of my
head. Probably other examples, but the engines can take an astounding
quantity of water. I've encountered rain heavy enough at approach speed
that the wipers on high speed couldn't even hope to keep up, but the
Pratts, God bless 'em, never even burped.


The smoke from that crash was visible from my childhood home, and we had
emergency vehicles running from New Hope, GA (where the crash occurred) and
by our house for hours that afternoon/evening.

Apparently, the aircraft entered a very nasty t-storm, which flooded out the
engines. According to a family friend who participated in the investigation,
the engines were over-heated and ruined when re-starts were attempted with
too much fuel fed to the engines.

One of the sadder aspects of the crash is that there were several aircraft
within gliding range of that DC-9, with the most obvious being my home
field - VPC. The DC-9 more or less overflew the field during its descent,
only to crash attempting a landing on a public road.

KB