Help the anxious co-pilot review the emergency protocols. Select ALL the phrases that grammatically complete the hypothetical scenario.
"__________, the entire crew would need to evacuate to the escape pods immediately."
The correct answers are Were the main engine to fail and If the main engine were to fail.
In formal, unreal conditionals (second conditional), we use the subjunctive were for all subjects.
To make the sentence even more formal or dramatic, we can drop "if" and invert the subject and verb: Were the main engine to fail.
"Was" is never used in conditional inversion, and we do not use "would" in the "if" clause of a standard conditional sentence.