Both Engines Failed Before New 737 Jet Crashed in England; Toll at 46

Both engines on a brand-new Boeing 737 apparently failed before the plane crashed along a highway, killing 46 people, officials said today. Aviation experts said the chances of double-engine failure were about 10 million to one.

“So far the evidence, although by no means conclusive, is consistent with the right engine having stopped before impact, and there are also signs of fire in the left engine,” Transport Minister Paul Channon said in a television interview.

Olivier Fagard, a spokesman for the company that makes the CFM-56 engines the jet used, said, “It is extremely improbable that both motors would break down in such a short interval.”

No Fire in 2nd Engine

“We have very impressive reliability statistics,” said Fagard, of the French company SNECMA, which builds the engines in a consortium with General Electric. “‘We don’t know. It has been established that there was no fire in the second motor. But we don’t know any more than that,” he said.

Officials raised the number of confirmed dead to 46 late today. Eighty people were injured.

Investigators recovered the flight recorders from the wreckage, and firefighters pumped foam onto the crumpled jet to prevent seeping aviation fuel from catching fire.

The Belfast-bound British Midland Airways jet carrying 126 people broke into three pieces on the edge of Britain’s main north-south highway, the M-1, in central England on Sunday night.

The twin-engine Boeing 737-400 narrowly missed the town of Kegworth and plowed into an embankment a few hundred yards short of the runway as the pilot struggled to make an emergency landing at East Midland Airport, 100 miles north of London.

Ham radio operator Mervyn Solloway said he heard “not a shouted message, but a bit of a frantic one to say, ‘We’ve got problems with the other engine.’ That was the last I heard from the aircraft.”