Board Urges Inspection of Jet Engines
Airlines should immediately ground dozens of commercial jets with a widely used General Electric engine that in June exploded in a parked Boeing 767 at Los Angeles International Airport and caused a spectacular fire, according to an independent federal safety board that released its report Monday.
Although the report does not identify the specific number of planes involved, it recommends inspection of the popular engine series for flaws that could cause an explosion. Engines that have been turned on and off more than 3,000 times and have not been serviced under post-2000 guidelines should be inspected immediately, the National Transportation Safety Board report adds.
The June 2 explosion at LAX occurred during a mechanics’ ground check of an American Airlines jet whose pilots had reported engine trouble during the previous flight. There were no passengers on board the Boeing 767, and no one was hurt.
“The Safety Board is concerned that another failure may be imminent if immediate action is not taken,” wrote Chairman Mark V. Rosenker in a 12-page letter to Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Marion Blakey.
The FAA, in the wake of the incident, ordered a new maintenance schedule requiring airlines to inspect the engines every 6,900 times they are turned on and off. The transportation and safety board’s recommendations, which are roughly twice as strict as those of the FAA, are not binding.
The board noted that the incident at LAX was similar to two engine failures in the last six years that occurred after a metal disk that holds fan blades in place spun out of control.
The board criticized the aviation agency for not responding aggressively enough to earlier problems and suggested that the new FAA order was too lax.
“If the FAA had implemented a more aggressive inspection schedule to address the increasing number of ... disks that were found with propagating cracks, the uncontained engine failure that occurred on the American Airlines 767 at Los Angeles may have been averted,” the board’s letter stated.
“The American Airlines incident raises serious safety concerns because, if it had occurred during flight rather than on the ground during maintenance, the airplane may not have been able to maintain safe flight.”
Ian Gregor, an FAA spokesman, said the agency would review the board’s recommendations and respond within 90 days.
“The FAA issued the airworthiness directive based on the best data available,” he said.
Rick Kennedy, a spokesman for Cincinnati-based GE Aviation, noting that the company had “no role” in drafting the board recommendations, said it concurred with the FAA. GE has said there have been only three engine failures in 12.5 million aircraft departures.
“We believe the FAA action, which followed an extensive investigation, is the appropriate course of action to ensure continued flight safety,” he said.
Up to 1,155 engines on a variety of wide-bodied aircraft, including Boeing 747s and 767s, McDonnell Douglas MD-11s and Airbus A300 and A310s, use the GE engines, which were built between 1980 and 2001. About 600 of the engines are subject to the FAA order.
The inspections, which involve taking the massive engines off the wings and tearing them down, can take weeks.
Previous problems with the engines included a September 2000 incident in which a USAir Boeing 767 exploded as mechanics were testing it on the ground at Philadelphia International Airport. A similar failure occurred in December 2002, when an engine on an Air New Zealand 767 failed at 11,000 feet on a flight from Auckland, New Zealand, to Brisbane, Australia. The plane landed safely.
In both instances, inspectors found hairline cracks in the engine disks similar to those discovered in debris recovered from the LAX explosion.
The board report said that several pieces of the disk on the American Airlines jet at LAX had exploded with such force that they cut the engine in half, puncturing fuel tanks and causing the fire. A 50-pound piece flew half a mile across the airport, shooting across a runway where an Air New Zealand jet had just landed.
The board also urged the FAA to determine whether there is a design flaw in the area of the disk that holds the fan blades. In 2001, GE redesigned the disk to strengthen that area, Kennedy said.
