And they sabotaged the turbines to fail on take off over a populated area...or somehow...they've developed a Stinger missile with no visible smoke trail. Hmmm..maybe the previous posters were right and it was shot out of the sky by a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists armed with 30.06s. Or perhaps they had three hundred trained falcons that attacked the engine all at once and caused a massive FOD.
Thanks, no. I'll stick with what I've seen and heard so far, and my experience with aircraft engines and their failure modes.
Look at post #884. Yeah, the one just above your's. Eyewitness: saw a flash at the
wing root, nothing unusual,
no smoke beforehand unlike those unattributed "pilot of the plane behind this one" reports. It's American, it's New York, baggage screening still sucks, Bush and the UNGA are in town, Osama said more would crash. I have no dog in this fight, but excuuuuuuuse me for thinking it is more likely a bomb than a spontaneous catastrophic failure.
Ever been in bad (stuff flying all over the cabin, people screaming) turbulence? Your biggest worry is the seatbelt giving way and you breaking your neck against the cabin interior. Wings don't fall off, even when it feels like Mother Nature is PMSing all over the plane.
F.O.D. (Foreign Object Damage)... very easy to do. Just through a monkey wrench in the engine, or leave it on an inlet cowling. And the newest Stingers I've seen leave no smoke trail.