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Jet Engine & Propeller Horrors!

S

_schnor

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Aug 14, 2001
Messages
983
First off, the following is a link to what appears to be a member of a USS carrier being sucked into a planes jet engine. (Link - caution, don't watch if you're squeemish, but bear in mind he's not badly hurt)

Link is dead. No archived version found.

Now in a really handy coincidence, it was on TV a few minutes ago (Ripley's believe it or not 2) and I found the following out :-

  • It occured in 1991 during Desert Storm,
  • It concerns a John David Bridges. A 20 yo Aviation Engineer,
  • He was an Inspector of Jet Aircraft on the USS Rosevelt,
  • The incident occured during routine damage job whilst training a new recruit (and was checking the back bar (?) and walked in instead of kneeling),
  • The flames coming out of the rear are his clothes,
  • Apparently he would have died but his body was wedged against the turbines nose column,
  • It "sucked the air out of my lung - I couldn't breathe for one minute"
  • After that time, the safety observer (presumably told the pilot) to shut down the engine,
  • Injuries were a fractured colarbone and a punctured eardrum, and finally,
  • Tracy (his wife) was stunned.
The make of plane was not mentioned.

Now, I can't for the life of me find anything to support these facts (if indeed this should actually be in the UL section) and am wondering if this is at all possible.

Could the film be faked, presumably people are occasionally minced by jet engines, but could you actually survive a quick trip albeit getting stuck, into a jet engine?

My knowledge of jet engines is slight, and I understand a trip through an engine would not be a possibility, but what are ballpark figures for forces/ survivability/ durations/ etc, here?

Thanks in advance :)
 
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I've seen that video before on television, and apparently it is real. There's nothing about it at http://www.snopes.com from what I can find. I don't know all that much about jets but I think it may be an A-6. I'm sure there are others with extensive knowledge of aircraft that will speak up...

sureshot
 
I saw that clip on Ripley too and was even more intrigued by another article on that prog featuring an elephant. As I remember, someone cleaning up in the elephant house walked too close behind one and her (think it was a her) head somehow disappeared up its backside! No ID found for that particular incident though. Pity.
 
I worked with a couple of guys who each worked on aircraft carriers for the US. According to them, it wasn't all too uncommon for someone to get chopped up a bit (ie decapitated) by a prop plane, or even worse, get reduced to human dust from getting sucked into a jet engine. According to their gruesome first-hand accounts, the jet engine doesn't leave much worth trying to pick up after it's done. Don't know what the chances are of getting stuck somewhere before getting uummm processed. I'll have to check out that video.
 
I'm certain it's real. Looks like he was checking the connection of the nose gear to the launch catapult. The A6 has a very narrow air intake and he could easily have been wedged in and saved from going into the turbine.

I work at an airport and we are constantly warned about the danger of getting too close to a running engine. Unlike an A6, on most airliners there is nothing to stop you getting pulled directly into the turbine blades.
 
Just looked up what the A6 actually is, and found this. It uses a turbofan engine using something called axial flow, from what I can gather, it means the inlet is indeed narrow.

Case closed? :)
 
jet engine horror

I just E-mailed my own father, a former aero-engineer re this clip; he has been unfortunate enough to see people sucked into engines more than once, and on each occasion bar one they survived, getting stuck in the inlet - he confirmed that when the engine is on relatively low revs, ie grounded and stationary, it is still powerful enough to suck someone in if you're not careful, and will tear the clothes from your back. My father reckoned the airman concerned was lucky to still have his arms, however.
If the plane was on the airstrip and moving, on the other hand, the man concerned would have been instant history. And yes, my dad has seen that happen. And no, he doesn't talk about it much... (suffice to say, the team that had to strip and repair the engine afterwards got paid an awful lot of overtime):eek!!!!:
 
Hmmm, sounds really nasty :( Thanks for finding some professional imput :)
 
what about bird strikes? do they just let them get minced up?
 
The engines are designed to cope with bird strikes, apparently, cos otherwise when they're doing low level manoeuvres the MOD could lose a couple of fighters a week.
According to the fount of wisdom (my dad again) they test for bird strike durability by, wait for it, using a kind of mini cannon to fire frozen chickens at static, running engines; this apparently approximates the density and impact speed of a bird strike at full throttle.
Who thought of that?:confused:

come to think of it, I wonder if a certain fast food chain produce their chicken nuggets anywhere near aero engine plants...

For more about bird strike testing using frozen chickens (etc.) see:

Flying Chicken UL? (Chicken Cannon; Bird Strike Testing)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...n-ul-chicken-cannon-bird-strike-testing.6777/
 
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This is indeed real. Have seen stuff like this in training videos from when I was an engineer. An unfortunate friend of mine was working on a 737-200 and was ingested, fortunately, like the A-6, the JT8D engine on the 200 series 737 has static blades in the inlet, which means that he stuck to those and only the end of his arm was removed, lucky guy.

However, on the other end of things, an instructor told me about doing engine runs on an F-4 Phanthom and having it tear a square of concrete out of the apron and flip it onto a Land Roiver Defender that was about 30 Ft away.

LD
 
brian ellwood said:
what about bird strikes? do they just let them get minced up?
Click to expand...
I was at RAF Lossiemouth a couple of years back on one of our little jaunts, as we do, and I remember a Tornado came in with an osprey, or most of one, anyway, smeared over the nose and part of it's right air intake torn away. Ospreys are endangered (more so now!), but it doesn't cost several million pounds to build one and train its pilot...
Most A6s have fish swimming in and out of their intakes now...
 
Inverurie Jones said:
Most A6s have fish swimming in and out of their intakes now...
Click to expand...

Why? Have most been decommisioned? It always strikes me as a waste when that happens :(

Couldn't they be sold for scrap?
 
As the A-6 TAnkbuster is a low flying bomber with low revs, I would hate to see the results of a bird being thrown into a B-70 Valkerie engines ( the most powerful turbine engines in the world).
 
more horror

link
Link is dead. See later post for archived version.

just ooi (out of interest).
 
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Propeller Death - would it really happen like this?

I'm thinking about this 'cos atm I'm reading Catch 22 and there's a bit where McWyatt flys in to buzz the beach and misjudges at the same time as Kid Sampson stands up on his raft and proptly gets liquidised by the propeller blade, leaving only his legs.

I'm sure I've seen this premise used a few times in action movies, though the only examples that I can think of right now are Raiders of the Lost Arc and (at a slight tangent) Dawn of the Dead, where a zombie is partly decapitated by a helicopter rotor.

Death by jet engine certainly pops up in a few films (Die Hard II, Die Another Day) and I know that one is tosh the way it's shown, as jet engines can easily be knocked out by a pidgeon, so I rather doubt you'd actually be turned into a torrent of pulp spewing from the rear, or that the engine would still work afterwards.

But as to airplane propellers? I can just about imagine that one might cut you in two, but would you really get totally shredded, and would the propeller not break or the engine be damaged by this? I'm just curious?
 
Well I suppose if you think about it the propellers on a plane are vertical, so aside from chopping off a limb that you stuck out at the wrong moment I'm not sure how much damage it could do ... Not that I'm thinking of going up to the airport and trying to find out you understand :)
 
I think it would be more like hacking - I think that Vic Morrow and the kids who were killed on the set of the Twilight Zone were beheaded (Vic and one child) or died of multiple deep body cuts (another child). One lost an arm, too.
 
Death, yes. Massive injury, yes. But shedding to nothing? Hmmm.

Props may be spinning at massive speeds but they aren't sharp - relatively speaking. I'd imagine on the first or maybe second sweep of the blade, the victim would be thrown from their feet and tossed out of the way - especially as the leading edge walloped into the torso.

A helicoper blade is thinner and more flexible so it might behead someone - if the blade managed to hit only the neck. But it would be a mess rather than a slice 'n' dice!

Merry Crimbo, everyone!
:twisted:
 
Basically what happens is, the impact on the first blow tends to remove the obstruction, be it your head or whatever, in either one or two blows. So ordinarily the damage done is not unlike the damage done by someone weilding a machette who happens to have incredible strong arms.

That's normally pretty much all their is to it because the velocity of the strike tends to knock the rest of the body out of the way. I say tends to because that's what happens in the majority of cases where people get their heads lopped off at the neck by helicopter blades.

Frape on the other hand I'd imagine possible, but the subject would need to be welded to the floor or stuck in some manner and the blade would have to act from an anchored point.
 
Not really about ways to damage a person, but there was a video image making the caught-on-camera type TV show rounds during (I think), the last half of the '90s, that showed an airport ground crew worker being sucked into a huge jet engine and then spit out unharmed again ~ engine spinning the whole time . . .
 
example said:
an airport ground crew worker being sucked into a huge jet engine and then spit out unharmed again ~ engine spinning the whole time . . .
Click to expand...
...and then he bowed and said "and now for my next trick," and threw himself under a steamroller.
;)


That's a pretty remarkable story.
 
It would depend on the speed of the propeller, anything near full-throttle and the hapless victim would basically explode, hydrostatic impact, kaplooie.
It no doubt happened on aircraft carriers a few times, during the heat of battle with heavily-damaged planes coming in.
 
example said:
engine spinning the whole time . . .
Click to expand...

Or maybe not. On reflection, it showed a guy being sucked into the engine while the plane was stationary. You couldn't really see what was going on inside the (housing?). Could there have been a vacuum effect without the engine spinning round?
 
Thanks for the link dreeness ~ after looking at the diagram, I can say that what the video showed was the guy being sucked into the air intake (front of the engine), and then after 2- 5 seconds, being shot back out the other side of the air intake. So maybe he just got sucked in, bumped up against the compressor (which looks like it would block a body from passing into the combustion chamber) and then spit back out the intake. He did not get shot out the jet pipe (back of the engine).
 
Pinklefish said:
more horror
link
Link is dead. See later post for archived version.
just ooi (out of interest).
Click to expand...
Here is the MIA story from Japan Today.
Man dies after jumping into engine of Air China plane

Friday, April 19, 2002 at 09:30 JST
OSAKA — A man committed suicide by jumping into an engine of an Air China passenger plane prior to its departure from Kansai airport near Osaka on Thursday, breaking the engine and stopping the flight, airport police said.

The man, believed to be Zhang Xinmin, a 39-year-old Chinese aircraft mechanic, jumped into the left engine of the Boeing 767 shortly after 2 p.m., the police said.

Air China aborted the departure of the flight headed for Beijing with 210 passengers due to the incident, but none of the passengers and 13 crew members was injured, they said.

According to witnesses, the mechanic suddenly ran out and jumped into the engine as aircraft mechanics were standing in line and waving the plane off. The aircraft was moving toward a taxiway at the time, they said.

The engine, with an interior fan 2.3 meters in diameter, was about 1.2 meters above the ground.

The incident did not affect departures or arrivals of other flights, said officials of the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry. (Kyodo News)
Click to expand...
SALVAGED FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020611221138/https://japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=212119
 
Australian golfer Jack Newton walked into the still moving propellers of a plane in 1983. My father was an acquaintance of his.

From the Archives, 1983: Golfer Jack Newton loses arm in plane accident​

First published in The Age on July 25, 1983

Jack Newton loses arm

SYDNEY.— The former Australian Open golf champion Jack Newton lost his right arm in an accident at Sydney Airport last night.

Early today, surgeons were still trying to re-attach the arm which was severed when Mr Newton stepped into a spinning aircraft propeller.
First published in The Age on July 25, 1983

Jack Newton loses arm

SYDNEY.— The former Australian Open golf champion Jack Newton lost his right arm in an accident at Sydney Airport last night.

Early today, surgeons were still trying to re-attach the arm which was severed when Mr Newton stepped into a spinning aircraft propeller.
Click to expand...
https://www.theage.com.au/national/...es-arm-in-plane-accident-20200703-p558w0.html
 
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