Double engine failure of Transair’s Boeing 737-200 cargo plane ‘almost unheard of’
By Annalisa Burgos
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Hawaii (KITV) — The Boeing 737-200 cargo plane operated by Transair that made an emergency water landing off the coast of western Oahu had only two people onboard and luckily no fatalities, but NTSB is treating this with the same gravity as if it was a passenger plane.
They are sending in specialists.. their so called “Go Team”.. who will try to find out what caused the engine failure. The Hawaii Department of Transportation telling ABC News both engines failed. Aviation experts say that’s extremely rare.
“This is a Boeing 737-200. This is an old airplane, it’s nearly 45-years-old,” said Tom Haueter, ABC News consultant and former NTSB Director of the Office of Aviation Safety. “The airplane should have been capable of coming back and landing on just one engine. So, there’s a lot of unknowns here.”
Among the questions investigators will be asking — how old were the engines, when was the last maintenance, what condition were the pilots in, what was weather and visibility like at 1 in the morning — and if any objects were ingested into the engines.
In 2009, a flock of birds flew into both engines of US Airways Flight 1549 — an Airbus A320 that landed on the Hudson River shortly taking off from New York’s LaGuardia airport. The chances of that happening here?
“It would be like winning the lottery two times in a row,” Haueter said.
“A twin engine turbojet going into the water has not occurred to my knowledge in Hawaiian waters. So this would be a first, especially as large an aircraft as a 737,” said Bruce Mayes, a 50-year veteran pilot and aviation safety consultant — he’s flown the 737-200 model and performed controlled emergency landings on it. He says double engine failure on these airplanes are almost unheard of.
“The airplane is actually very, very reliable and can be counted on to fly on one engine, assuming the remaining engine is producing required thrust,” Mayes said. “Most of the aircraft coming back and forth to the mainland are in fact two engine aircraft, the reliability has increased over the years to a level of confidence that having a double engine failure in these types of airplanes would be infinitesimally remote.”
“I think here what we might be seeing is that they lost one engine due to a mechanical reason. The second engine started overheating because they had to go to max power to return,” Haueter said.
ABC News reports the airplane sank at about 150 feet — good news for recovering the flight recorder and potentially any cargo — the deeper the wreckage, the harder it would be to recover.
“These aircraft normally will carry seven cargo containers on the flight deck or on the cargo deck rather of the aircraft. And in those cargo containers could be everything from papayas to sewing needles to anything you can imagine,” Mayes said.
The nature of the cargo is also important Mayes says, especially if it included hazardous materials.
KITV-4 asked TransAir for details on the cargo and are waiting for a reply.
Mayes says NTSB investigators will have a better idea on what caused this incident within the week but it could take up to a year before a full investigative report reveals what actually happened.
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