this is a hard riddle?
Charles Lindbergh's dramatic solo flight from New York to Paris in May 1927 has become part of aviation history. The Spirit of St. Louis was a single-engine plane. The flight took 33 hours and the engine performed perfectly although it had not been tested nonstop for such a period of time. There was the risk of engine failure and the question you are asked to consider is this: If the plane had been powered by two identical engines made by the same manufacturer and assuming that engineering technology was not sufficiently advanced to enable the plane to maintain flight on a single engine if one had failed, would Lindbergh have been safer or less safe with a twin engine plane, or would it have made no difference?
Public Comments
- ask any pilot mechanical redundancy equals fail safe reliability
- no difference
- I think it would have been worse because if one of the engines blew out, the plane would not have been able to go on and it would have failed.
- It makes no difference. It makes no difference because we are in 2007 and that was 1927.
- If 1 engine in a small aircraft fails the plane still goes down. Not straight to the ground but to the ground or water as the case might be. So no, he would be no safer.
- i think it would be better because if one engine blew out he'd still have some power to get a little farther or sumthin...i might be way off so if i am just ignore this
- With 2 engines, if 1 failed, he would have had more control to try and land with the 1 engine working.
- Less safe. With two engines you increase the chance of mechanical failure. What if the plane needed four engines, and if one failed the plane would go down. The odds for mechanical failure increase even more.
- This one is actually pretty easy to answer. Let's assume the probability of the engine( single) to fail is 5%. In the case of one engine plane, the probability of failure( the plane going down due to engine failure and not making it across the Pacific Ocean) is 5%. In the case of twin engine plane, the probability of failure is the probability of either the failure of engine A or failure of engine B. Those two events are mutually exclusive - the failure of a second engine is independent in the event that the first engine fails. Thus the P(A or B) = P(A) +P(B) = 10%. Twin engine plane is clearly twice as worse as single engine plane, in this scenario.
