I would be hesitant to ascribe much weight here to eye witness testimony. Since it is very often wrong. Especially after they have experienced such an incredible situation.
Sure I guess loss of thrust of both engines on takeoff could explain this. It would explain lots of this. But that is very difficult to achieve, since that is a failure a ton of attention is paid to. We have seen a couple recent incidents of that happening, with the landing in the Hudson due to bird strikes and 777 at Heathrow on landing likely due to ice in the fuel clogging the fuel lines and starving the engines.
But if both engines failed, the RAT should deploy and I don’t see it or hear it.
This was the very first thing I thought of when I heard he survived. I remember in that movie when we found out about that plane crash and how it happened, mind blown…
the obvious next question is what would call a dual engine failure on a modern (?) relatively new aircraft; maintenance or lack thereof, fuel contamination as he suggested or something else
i’d have thought if it was the fuel that it would not be limited to a single aircraft that had left there?
Every explanation seems improbable, but one of them must be true. For fuel contamination, maybe that jet got fueled from the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, and the next jet got fueled from a new batch.
The RAT deploying means an entire system failure which also means the apu was not functioning, you can still dispatch a plane without the apu but for a modern jet with it’s many back up’s on top of it’s back up’s to have a total systems failure is very rare to say the least, but one must wonder with all the electronics on modern jets, but the apu has it’s own separate system so for it not to be running either…
I forget the exact details. But I believe the RAT will deploy whether or not the APU is running, because you would not want to wait to verify the APU spun up to deploy the RAT and additionally you don’t want the RAT deploy logic to even care about APU status.
But whether the APU was running or not, the lack of thrust is the issue here and neither the APU nor the RAT would address that.
An issue here is that low airspeeds, the RAT will not be producing enough full hydraulic power for flight controls. This is normally just an issue right at touch down, but could be a factor here if the airspeed was never high to begin with.
Loss of flight controls is sort of a secondary issue if you lose both engines at 200 ft over a city.
I have a hard time with contaminated fuel that allowed for a nominal takeoff and kills both engines simultaneously. My theory is something triggered the fuel cut signal to both engines, but that is pretty implausible as well.
Calling it. They loaded a wrong takeoff config into FMS. Flaps position or thrust setting. It’s why the plane didn’t scream at them on the takeoff roll. Then they had a loooong takeoff roll. Failed to abort at their decision point. Ran off the end of the runway before barely lifting off. Debris from the unpaved runway safety zone FODed both engines.
Or hell they ignored the incorrect config warnings. It’s happened before.
