How many minutes can an aircraft fly after losing an engine?

The aircraft doesn't have to lose altitude particularly rapidly to keep flying and therefore if both engines were to fail a high altitude, the aircraft may have as much as 20 – 30 minutes of airbourne time to find somewhere to land before it reaches the ground.



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Even if some or all of an airplane's engines fail, it can still safely glide while descending in preparation of an emergency landing. An airplane won't just drop to the ground after its engines fail. Airplanes are designed with long wings to create lift, which essentially holds them in the air.

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Can planes fly on just one engine? Absolutely. That is what they are designed to do. By law, planes have to be able to fly from point A to point B, over water, on just one engine.

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This means that the aircraft can fly routes that take it as far as 330 minutes (five and a half hours) of single-engine flying time from the nearest viable airport. Other twin-engine airliners, like the Boeing 777, are also certified for ETOPS 330. The Boeing 767 is certified for as much as 180 minutes of ETOPS.

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Overwater flights are dispatched with ETOPS requirements in mind to ensure that a diversion airport is always within reach, assuming that the engine failure or shut down doesn't lead to other problems with the aircraft.

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The most well-known case here is the US Airways 1549 Miracle on the Hudson landing. The Airbus A320 aircraft struck a large flock of Canada geese on take-off from New York La Guardia airport - at an altitude of just under 3,000 feet. This caused both engines to shut down, and they could not be restarted.

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Techincally, there is only one way for the aircraft to remain hanging motionless in the air: if weight and lift cancel each other out perfectly, and at the same time thrust and drag cancel each other out too. But this is incredibly rare. To stay in the air and sustain its flight, an aircraft needs to be moving forward.

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Conclusion. While it's very clear that a 747 cannot fly properly with the failure of three engines, we can see that a single functioning engine would at least extend the aircraft's distance and prolong its time in the air. Hopefully, this would buy enough time and distance for the 747 to reach a suitable landing spot.

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Answer: It would vary depending upon the wind, but around 100 miles would be a good estimate. Having all engines quit in a modern airplane is extremely rare.

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Without engine thrust, the 747 had a glide ratio of 15:1, meaning it can glide forward 15 kilometres for every kilometre it drops. After calculating the glide ratio, the crew realized that they had less than 30 minutes to regain power before they smashed into the ground.

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Area and flight level Specific areas have been designated where fuel dumping is allowed to avoid damage or harm where the fuel may drop; generally speaking, this is above seas or unpopulated areas above land.

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In this case, the aircraft will try to do it overland (not water) or away from populated areas, as it is the equivalent of dumping thousands of liters of petrol onto an urban area. The FAA mentions explicitly that any dumping can't occur under 2,000 feet.

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According to flight attendant Brenda Orelus, the dirties place on an airplane is not the lavatory or the tray tables. It is the seat-back pockets. IN a video that Orelus posted on TikTok she revealed to her more than 100,000 followers that the pockets are full of germs and are almost never cleaned.

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Airlines find that fuel dumping can actually be cheaper than not dumping in certain circumstances. But it's not something pilots do on a routine basis. We spoke with Alison Duquette, spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), who assured us that it doesn't happen very often.

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From the mid-1990s, twin-engine aircraft such as the Boeing 777 and Airbus A330 offered the same payload, the same range and lower operating cost than the triples, and that was the end of the road for the triple-engine giants as passenger aircraft.

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