Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Regulators to require inspections after jet engine explosion
PHILADELPHIA » U.S. airline regulators said Wednesday that they will order inspections on engine fan blades like the one involved in fatal failure that killed a woman in a plane that made an emergency landing in Philadelphia.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it will issue a directive in the next two weeks to require ultrasonic inspections of CFM567B engines after reaching a certain number of takeoffs.
The FAA decision comes nearly a year after the engine’s manufacture recommended that airlines using certain CFM56 engines conduct ultrasonic inspections to look for cracks.
Federal investigators said that initial findings show that Tuesday’s emergency was caused by a fan blade that snapped off, leading to debris hitting the Southwest Airlines plane and a woman being partially blown out a window. She later died.
Metal fatigue — microscopic cracks that can splinter open under the kind of stress placed on jetliners and their engines — was also blamed for an engine failure on a Southwest plane in Florida in 2016.
That led manufacturer CFM International, a joint venture of General Electric Co. and France’s Safran SA, to recommend last June that airlines conduct the inspections of fan blades on many Boeing 737s.
European regulators last month required airlines flying in Europe to conduct the inspection, but the FAA had not yet required them despite proposing a similar directive last August.
Investigators say a fan blade snapped off as Southwest Flight 1380 cruised at 500 mph high above Pennsylvania on Tuesday, setting off a catastrophic chain of events that killed a woman and broke a string of eight straight years without a fatal accident involving a U.S. airliner.
“Engine failures like this should not occur,” Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said Wednesday. Sumwalt expressed concern about such a destructive engine failure but said he would not yet draw broad conclusions about the safety of CFM56 engines or the entire fleet of Boeing 737s, the most popular airliner ever built.
Federal investigators were still trying to determine how a window came out of the plane, killing the woman seated next to it who was wearing a seatbelt. No plastic material from the window was found inside the plane.
Family members have identified the woman as 43-year-old Jennifer Riordan, a banking executive and mother of two from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Passengers say Riordan was partially blown out of the window and Philadelphia’s medical examiner said Wednesday that she was killed by blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso.
Investigators also said the plane landed at unusually high speed because the pilots feared losing control if they flew slower. Sumwalt said the plane touched down at about 190 mph, while a jet of that size would typically land at around 155 mph.
The leading edge of the left wing was damaged by shrapnel from the engine explosion.
It is unclear whether the FAA’s original directive would have forced Southwest to quickly inspect the engine that blew up. CEO Gary Kelly said it had logged only 10,000 cycles since being overhauled.
Before Wednesday’s announcement, critics accused the FAA of inaction in the face of a threat to safety.