that engine is banged up enough that if it was a bird strike, there would have to be multiple birds of large size. but proabably not because 1) Every fan blade has damage 2) There is no blood spatter on the edge of the engine. 3) if you look at pic #2, see the straigt blades behind the destroyed ones? (The straigt ones don't spin.) They are untouched.
Those staps don't look airworthy, but hey-Chinese Intuition.
It almost looks as if someone took a large, heavy object and banged it against the blades as they were wind-milling (spining from the wind), but never touched anything else. Now why someone would do that is beyond me, but I belive that the damage was either by dirt-poor maintinence, or intentional.
As for the story on seatbelts: Bull****. The blades move so fast, (very roughly ~15,000 rpm) that the seatbelt would tear itself apart, not only from being flung off the blades by cintrifugal force, but beat into subbmisison by the wind speed. There's also the matter of engine heat on the ground, and -50 F cold temperature at 36,000 ft.
If this is what only a portion of the plane looks like, i don't want to see the rest.
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