I was scanning through some photos from my travels to Oregon with Mark and came across some photos of a United Airlines 737-700 landing at PDX. It was braking and had the reversers deployed. Looking at the shots, there is a dark burn mark on the engine nacelle that is split either side of the join in the reverser. It looks like something has been cooked a little. Anyone with experience that can suggest what has been going on with this engine?
When you get lots of similar jets arriving, you can mess around a bit. The 500mm was far too long for the touchdown shots for most aircraft but, when you are getting a bunch of Air Canada A320s, no harm in cropping in really tight on some of them. The CFM-56 reversers are a bucket type so they splay out from the nacelle. With the evening light, you can see lots of detail in the structure. I played with a similar effect on some of the other jets too.
Watching a bunch of arrivals at Vancouver, I got a lot of shots of aircraft reversing thrust. Current jets fall into one of two categories. Cascade reversers or bucket reversers. The bucket reversers aren’t quite as obvious as those fitted to the old 737-200s where they clamped across the whole exhaust but the effect is much the same. Bucket reversers look like they are doing the job to me. They hang out and you can imagine the flow being turned around as they power up. Cascade reversers are far more subtly as the nacelle translates aft and the flow is redirected out of the based of fins that is now exposed. I imagine they are similarly effective but I have no data to back that up. If someone knows more, please let me know as I am genuinely interested to find out.
