"Joerg" wrote in message
om...
Then there are a couple huge engines hanging under the fuel filled wings.
And occasionally one of these goes kaputt. That happened when I was a
passenger on a flight while still over the atlantic, leaving only one
engine to fly on. I believe that the maintenance crew also had to massage
all those clenched armrests back into shape after the landing. But at
least nobody freaked out and despite the uneven thrust the pilot almost
made the landing a perfect greaser. That must have been a white knuckle
event.

According to a friend of mine who used to fly helicopters to oil rigs, it's
not exactly a white knuckle ride, but there is always a bit of a nagging
thought in the mind of the pilots along the lines of "Unless we're 100% sure
why that engine broke, we can't be sure the other one won't" and so it's
always a relief when you get it on the ground. My friend had a gearbox break
one day, but there were two engines and two gearboxes, and the second one
worked fine and the flight went off safely.

You can't be sure, after all, that whatever caused the fault in one engine
won't do so in another. I remember reading of an incident in a three-engine
aircraft (DC-10?) where a mechanic changed the magnetic chip detectors
(little screw-in plugs that attract particles of metal that have worn off
the engine so you can analyse them) and replaced them with new ones that
didn't have their rubber seals fitted. So all three engines ran low on oil
some way into the flight. Initially they thought there was a spurious oil
leak (ruptured/worn pipe or whatever) in the engine that failed first, only
to see the oil pressure drop on the other two first!

D.