I'm here because we broke down—in a big an obvious way. Tower regularly stops here on their freighter runs, but just to refuel. Yesterday evening we left Buenos Aires empty and flew to Santiago, where we loaded up and headed for Miami via Lima for the refueling. The captain flew the Buenos Aires to Santiago leg, I flew the Santiago to Lima leg, so it was the captain's turn to fly Lima to Miami. We had a honest to goodness engine failure coming out of Lima. I wish the leg had been mine for the experience. Even so, it was very informative just being the non-flying pilot.

We had noticed that the #1 engine had been running 50 degrees hotter than the others. The engine logs showed it had been doing that for some time. At cruise that meant that while the other engines were around 780 degrees Celsius, #1 was around 830. That in itself is no problem, but it's an indication that the engine is getting a little sick. Some outfits would change out an engine doing that to avoid catastrophic failure, but that's not Tower's policy. The question is: do you let the engine limp along until it's next overhaul or take the chance that you will completely trash it if it blows.

It's might be more cost effective overall in the long run to let engines limp along, but in this instance Tower was penny-wise and pound-foolish, and we trashed an engine.

We took off to the south and were climbing through 500 feet when the engine blew. There was a loud bang, a quick but violent yaw to the left, and the captain yelled, “Engine failure!. From that point on until we got down to the ground, he was obviously a little excited.

The flight engineer had a little warning of possible trouble. A few words on the technicalities of a takeoff and the engines will make things clearer. When you start the takeoff roll, the flying pilot advances the power levers to close to the takeoff epr (engine pressure ratio—I'll explain later). The flight engineer then fine-tunes the power settings to the exact epr while watching the egt's (exhaust gas temperatures—also later) to make sure temperature limitations are not exceeded. Throughout the takeoff roll and until level off at altitude, it's the flight engineer who controls the power levers, making the sure the epr's are set correctly—they change as you climb.

[Technical notes. The primary measure of engine power on our engines is the engine pressure ratio. There's a pressure sensor at the front of the engine and at the rear. The epr is the ratio obtained by dividing the pressure at the rear by the pressure at the front. A typical takeoff epr at a sea-level airport in warm temperatures is 1.45. That's what we were using yesterday. The exhaust gas temperature is measured in degrees Celsius. It's the temperature of the exhaust as it leaves the last turbine stage. Maximum egt for takeoff is 915 degrees Celcius, although a healthy engine will stay down in the mid 800's during takeoff. A little yellow warning light illuminates on each engine's egt gauge when you get close to 915, and a “sticky” pointer records the highest temperature reached since it was last reset.]

During the takeoff roll, #1's egt had started to exceed 915, and the engineer had properly retarded that throttle slightly to keep it within limits...then at 500 feet it jumped, but before the engineer had time to react, the engine blew.

We found out later that the noise was widely heard. People on the airport reported it, and people living in the community along our flight path started phoning the airport to say they had heard an explosion from a “big white airplane.” Interesting, and as an example of how information gets out of hand, Tower's ground handler in Lima (he had left in his car when we taxiied out) was called on his cellular phone and told that the airplane had exploded in the air.

In actual fact, what happened was that we notified ATC and arranged to go into a holding pattern 30 miles out the 300 degree radial from the Lima VOR (the VOR is on the airport). The hold was necessary to give us time to dump 120,000 pounds of fuel—about 18,000 gallons. To the engineer's credit, he had immediately starting dumping fuel without waiting for the captain's command—you do that when you think your butt is on the line: a maxed out airplane weight-wise with a possibly catastrophic engine failure.

The only scary part happened a minute or so after the failure. We had cleaned up the airplane—gotten the flaps and leading edge devices up—when the airplane started to sink. The ground proximity warning system (GPWS) went off saying, “Don't sink, don't sink....” Later the engineer told me that when he heard that, he really “puckered up”. I must confess I got a healthy shot of adrenalin as well.

Why it started sinking we don't know. The sink lasted only a few seconds, and we then started a slow climb. Eventually we climbed up to 3000 feet in the hold. After the hold, we shot the ILS into runway 15 and landed without incident to waiting emergency equipment, filled out paperwork for the airport authorities, and came to the hotel.

In any abnormal situation, especially one bordering on an emergency, there's always a lot of confusion and mis-communication. People get exicted, the adrenalin pumps, you get tunnel vision, your attention narrows. All that of course happened. Two things are of interest. They illustrate the above and also the language problem inherent when the pilots and the controllers do not have the same native language.

The first problem was the direction of our hold. I understood the controllers to be saying we should hold on the 30 dme (distance measuring equipment) fix out the 300 degree radial from Lima using 10 mile legs. The captain heard the same instructions as I but interpreted them to mean he should hold between 20 dme and 30 dme. I interpreted them to mean he should hold between 30 dme and 40 dme. I elected not to challenge him on it; he had his hands full with the airplane, and I didn't feel there was any practical difference. However, after we went into the wrong hold, ATC came back at us. After several exchanges they made it clear we should hold between 30 and 40.

The second problem occurred after we had finished dumping fuel and were cleared back to the airport for the ILS (we were in the clouds by the way). The captain turned the wrong way (left) and headed farther out to sea. I said, “You need to turn right.” He said, “No, reverse sensing,” referring to the fact that on some older instrumentation setups you need to turn away from the course deviation indicator rather than toward it, and he continued the turn. This was significant, so I kept talking, tuned my navvigational radio as well from the VOR to the ILS (which his was already on), but set a reciprocal heading on mine. On the newer setups (well, actually old as well but not as old as the setups of which he was thinking) regardless of whether you choose the inbound course or the outbound course (the reciprocal), it shows that you should turn toward the course deviation indicator. He immediately saw the problem and started banking back toward the right. At that moment, ATC called us and asked why were turning out to sea, so that provided confirmation to what I had been saying.