Ed Rasimus wrote:
While peace-time redundancy is good--losing an engine due to a
maintenance malfunction, the airplane is still recoverable, the
situation changes in combat. My experience (and admittedly lots of
things have changed since then), was that when the engine loss occurs
due to battle damage, it won't be long before the engine sheds parts,
throws turbine blades, starts a major fire, or whatever. That means
losing the second engine and the situation then is identical to the
single engine airplane.


As for how long the listed aircraft can fly on one engine, I brought
an F-4E with one engine shut-down due to a fire light home from the
NVN/Laos border near Sam Neue, through an aerial refueling and back to
Thailand where I recovered at Udorn. I cleaned the airplane off (the
tanks had already been jettisoned earlier in the mission, and the
racks went when the engine got shut down,) it it flew quite
comfortably.


Ed, these two paragraphs seem to contradict one another. It seems to me if an
engine is shut down before it self destructs catastrophically, you're better off
with the second engine. If it flushes itself too quickly to catch, then you're
no worse off than in a single engine aircraft... flying the proverbial lead
sled.

Of course, there are aspects of flight where I'd just as soon just have a single
anyway, but that's been beat to death already.


--
Mortimer Schnerd, RN


http://www.mortimerschnerd.com