In the early hours of Friday, a Boeing 777 made an emergency landing in Moscow, according to Russian media. The Interfax news agency quotes an anonymous source who says the landing was caused by an engine failure on a flight from Hong Kong to Madrid. According to the Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department, this was a cargo flight. So far, no injuries have been reported.
Engine failures happen, pilots train for them and our airport infrastructure is configured to accommodate emergency landings like this. However, the timing of this reported failure is remarkable. This is the second engine failure on a 777 in a week, and the third on a Boeing aircraft.
Just after takeoff on Saturday, February 20, a United Airlines flight to Hawaii made an emergency landing after suffering a catastrophic failure of the correct engine. The event was widely shared on social media, you probably saw a video of a passenger inside the Boeing 777-200 showing the damaged engine on fire – if you didn’t, you should. There was also damage to the soil due to falling debris. This led Boeing to launch inspections on all 777-200s, and shortly thereafter the NTSB published pictures of the damaged engine. No injuries were reported.
Two days later, on February 22, a Boeing 747-400 cargo plane operated by Longtail Aviation suffered an engine failure in the Netherlands, dropping parts that would have injured two people on the ground. This is a different model of aircraft, but uses a Pratt & Whitney PW4000, from the same family as the Pratt & Whitney PW4070 / 4090 on United 777-200.
The reports of this morning’s emergency landing in Moscow will need to be checked and investigated, and we have seen no confirmation as to what type of engine the Rossiya Airlines B777-300ER used. For comparison, United’s 777-300ERs and Emirates-operated 777-300ERs use General Electric engines instead of the Pratt & Whitney models, so it is likely that the Rossiya aircraft also had a GE engine.
The fact that all flights were able to land safely is proof of the redundant engineering of these aircraft. CNET plunged deeply into the engine failure last Saturday and noted that it was an Extended-range Operations Performance Standards (ETOPS) aircraft, capable of flying long distances with a single engine – necessary if an aircraft needed to make halfway to Hawaii in an engine for an emergency landing. They also report two other Pratt & Whitney PW-4000 engine failures in 2018 and 2000 2020, although as mentioned before, today’s incident probably did not involve an engine from this manufacturer.
[Main image source: B777-300 by Maarten Visser CC-BY-SA 2.0]