$279,100 Offered by GE for Parts of Crashed DC-10

Investigators say they are at an impasse in their efforts to explain the jet engine explosion that led to the DC-10 crash last month in Sioux City, Iowa, and General Electric Co., the engine’s maker, has offered $279,100 in rewards to Iowa farmers who find missing aircraft pieces that might help solve the puzzle.

GE, in letters received by farmers this week, is offering as much as $50,000 for an engine disc and $1,000 each for 20 nuts and 20 bolts that are thought to have rained down from the jetliner’s CF6-6D turbofan engine when it burst apart 37,000 feet above northwest Iowa.

But some farmers said it will be hard to find the missing parts because corn crops now stand 6 to 10 feet high and soybeans reach about 4 feet.

Crops Dense in Fields

“It’s so dense out there, you could walk right by (debris) and not know it. Especially those 3/4-inch bolts,” said Mark Sorbe, who farms about 1,000 acres in Buena Vista County, Iowa, about 60 miles from the crash site.

Sorbe said that “a couple of months from now, when we harvest our crops, those parts will be a lot easier to find.” For now, he said of GE’s offer, “I hope it doesn’t cause a certain amount of panic out here, so everybody and their dog doesn’t come running through my cornfield.”

To prevent a stampede of reward seekers, GE emphasized in its letters that rewards will be paid only to landowners, tenants or others who have the written permission of the owners to search their land.

111 Died in Crash

Federal investigators said that, without at least some of the missing parts, they cannot determine why the DC-10’s tail engine blew apart, severing the hydraulic lines that control the plane’s steering, pitch and roll. The pilots guided the United Airlines jumbo jet to the Sioux City airport, where it cartwheeled in a fiery crash that killed 111 people.

“We’re kind of at an impasse,” one investigator said. “We’re not even close to finding out which piece failed. The key pieces are still missing.”

A jet engine works by sucking in air, compressing it, adding fuel and then igniting the mixture to produce thrust. Among the missing pieces is most of the engine’s fan assembly, the ring of blades that draw air into the engine. The assembly includes a 300-pound titanium disc that attaches 38 3-foot-tall blades to the rotor, which spins at up to 3,800 revolutions a minute.