A chunk of metal that fell off a plane landing at Midway Airport and crashed through the roof of a nearby home early today was an engine part from an aircraft, aviation officials said.
The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed this afternoon that the piece of metal was a turbine wheel from the engine of a Mitsubishi MU-2B-36, a fixed wing multi-engine aircraft, registered to a Colorado firm. It was arriving at the Southwest Side airport after departing from Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee.
I’m assuming the Rice Rocket pilot simply meant there was nothing out of the ordinary for a single engine failure. He may not have known he had a hot section blow out.
I haven’t been able to find a record of a plane arriving at KMDW around the reported time (0115CT) An updated version of the story says it came from Michigan, departing at 0125ET. Ideas why there’s no corresponding record?
I saw the part that fell on the news. It appeared to me that it was a turbine wheel. There is absolutely no doubt that whomever was flying the aircraft this part came from, definitely knew something had happened. It would be almost impossible for that to go undetected.
An uncontained engine failure is a pretty big deal in a light turboprop like an MU2. I just can’t imagine that the pilot never mentioned a thing to ATC. On the other hand, those old freight dog MU2’s are pretty beat up … the pilots are probably used to those strange occurrences.
Yes, being an MU2 driver myself, I can tell you that an uncontained engine failure is DEFINITELY bound to get your attention. I haven’t ever had one, but I think this is one of those things you can make pretty educated guesses about
I wonder what caused it… Maybe a ruptured fuel spline? That’s the only condition I can readily think of which may cause something like this within a fairly short time (a minute or so), if not caught: they give you this problem on the sim every now and then. It’s kinda interesting, because it causes fuel to be injected into the engine at full blast (way more than you would ever use in any situation of flight, since the engines are flat-rated at 765HP). So you get an asymmetric thrust condition, but if you go by “dead foot, dead engine” you’ll feather your healthy engine, because the sick engine is actually over-thrusting…
MDW on Thur., or Fri. morning, were using the ILS 31C w/ circle to 22L, when the engine failed he was well into the cilrcling procedure and was too busy flying the plane to contact tower.
The plane was in pretty rough shape. The blade exited the side of the cowling, through the bottom of the wing and out the top, very close to striking fuel lines. He did land and taxi to parking without incident.
Having had an engine failure in a Jet flying a Garrett 731 it is noticable. You have to report the failure but you don’t necesarily have to file a report to the NTSB. IN my case we had to declare an emergency and so there for a report to the FAA was required.
Without dumping on the whole industry even though the pilot may have noticed the engine failure and might have reported it to his superiors as required…I"m not surprised that a freight operator at that level may have avoided reporting it.
