El Al 1862 was another flight [1] that had an engine fall off, taking another engine out with it. The pilots managed to fly around for a few minutes and attempt a landing, but there was too much structural damage.
It doesn't seem aircraft are designed to survive these types of catastrophic failures.
They seem to have lost the tail engine too. Yes, it is a significant problem that engine failures aren't independent, so trijets are kind of a bad design.
Not only did it happen at the worst possible moment, it took out a second engine on it's way out and over the plane. Two engines should've been enough to get off the ground and potentially land the plane, but one engine on a trijet isn't enough.
Yeah, pilots I know saw puffs of flame coming out of the engine, and said that that's a tell-tale sign of a compressor stall. Which could have been caused by debris from the separating left engine striking the turbine.
The video of the aircraft crossing the road wings level (well after #1 separated) and maintaining relatively controlled flight until too much energy bled off suggests to me the aircraft was likely to be controllable to a landing if sufficient thrust was available.
Yeah, if they had had more altitude, I would guess that this would have looked even more like the AA 191 crash from 1979, with the left wing stalling and causing a roll and pitch down.
That in turn reminds me of the DHL flight out of Baghdad in 2003 that was hit by a missile [0]. Absolutely amazing that they managed to keep it together and land with damage like that.
An important factor in AA 191 is that the engine leaving did significant damage to the hydraulic lines in that wing - including those for the leading-edge slats. At the time the plane was not equipped with any mechanism to keep the slats extended, so after hydraulic pressure was lost airflow over the wings caused them to retract, which significantly lowered that wing's stall speed.
After AA 191 the DC-10 was equipped with a locking system: loss of pressure now results in the slats getting stuck in their current position. The MD-11 will undoubtedly also have this system, so a direct repeat of AA 191 is unlikely.
From the wing down I assumed it may have depended if the engine coming out unintentionally means redundant hydraulic lines and mounts are also getting disconnected causing a complete loss of control not that it would have helped much at that point beyond minimizing ground damages.
Dropping an engine entirely is a similar situation to a failure - with the benefit that you now have a substantially lighter if imbalanced aircraft.
Should this plane have been able to fly by design even with an engine fallen off?