A321 Pan on Christmas

[zaitcev]

Here's an interesting blog article:
http://www.geekinthecockpit.com/2020/01/well-that-was-not-fun-at-all.html

This 321 was legacy US Airways and only had about 5000 cycles on it. There was a MEL on the left generator. The generator was having issues and was taken offline. We ran the APU for the entire flight to take the place of the left generator.

Things were fine until we started our descent to DFW from 33,000 feet. Once the engines idled down things got "exciting". The RIGHT engine had a compressor stall. The ECAM stated the engine failed...but it was still making power. We followed the ECAM checklist. One action was to take the number right generator offline. The left was already offline. We were left with just the APU. If that failed we would be on the RAT.

I continued running checklist and preparing the aircraft. The Captain advised the Flight Attendants and Passengers. Everything seemed to be going smoothly.

Once on final the right engine somehow appeared normal. All the errors went away. We decided to land normally.

There were emergency vehicles on each end of the runway. Normal landing. The Captain went to full reverse on both engines. Both reacted normally. Once he came out of reverse....the right engine fully failed. Gone.

I wonder how often stuff like this happens. Good thing those passenger jets have some redundancies.

P.S. It was a pleasant surprise to know that Airbus can run APU in flight. In old Russian jets such as Tu-154, the ram air effect in flight would spool up the APU and overspeed it. They had a check hatch to prevent the air intake in flight. In 1995, that door failed, the ram air oversped the APU, which exploded and took out all redundant hydraulic strings. The jet lost control and landed into a cow pen. Investigators had fun time separating human remains from animals.